The CIA struck a deal with the Saudis to monitor the hijackers and not tell the FBI?

[Axxman300]

The frustrating part is, of all the 9/11 conspiracy theories that have come about over the years, this is one that may have been true. But we've had 20 years of being saturated by total f*ing ridiculous claims from "9/11 Truth" that the public is way over having to now deal with something else.

The Irony is, if this one was in fact true, then "9/11 Truth" actually helped the CIA get away with it.

Not just the CIA. The FBI chose to fail. They got caught up in turf-wars between the NYC office's Al Qaeda desk, and Quantico's counter-terrorism desk, essentially sending the wrong people to investigate the USS Cole bombing. And then there was the inept US Ambassador to Yemen. And US Customs had an unwritten rule about hassling incoming Saudis, and Arab nationals to the point where the lone Customs agent who refused to let an Al Qaeda hijacker into the country had to endure heat from his management about sending the guy packing. The NSA had all the communications between Al Qaeda and their financiers in Spain, and elsewhere, but because Al Qaeda hadn't been flagged by Langley, those communications sat in storage until an emergency inventory after 9-11.

And to this day, no one has explained the intel behind the State Department's travel warning for July and August, 2001, wherein they stated they had reason to believe Al Qaeda was planning to hijack airliners in the Mediterranean. The warning expired the first week of September, 2001, and remains the only US government warning containing anything about Al Qaeda hijacking passenger jets. The travel warning vanished from the DOS website in 2010, but it can be found in newspaper archives. This was never explored by the 911 Commission, or anyone else.

On the US Government side of 9-11, it was a team effort of bureaucracy in a time when the White House and Congress aggressively pretended things were just dandy in the rest of the world.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

Yes there was a communications disconnect between the FBI and the CIA, this has been documented and hopefully fixed. However I don't see anything nefarious about this other than the failure to share information.

It's a pretty understandable failure too, and perhaps we shouldn't be too eager for solutions.

Historically there's always supposed to be a bit of a wall between CIA spookery that focuses on foreigners overseas and the FBI which is a domestic law enforcement agency. The FBI is supposed to be constrained by the constitutional rights of American citizens, meanwhile the CIA can play things a bit looser when dealing with foreign affairs, including a long history of dealing with quite unsavory people doing unsavory things. They also have very different goals, where the CIA is an intelligence organization and the FBI is about investigating and prosecuting crimes. Keeping a bit of distance between the two isn't necessarily a bad idea.

 

[Allen773]

You're just going to have to wait, and the whole story might never see the light of day. That's just how it is. You don't have to like it, but this is the world we've been living in.

All of those points you brought up have been discussed and debated here, and in the 911 Commission Report, and the CIA IG Report. The closest we (the public) have ever come to a name responsible for choking off the flow of intelligence between the CIA and FBI was a 2021 History Channel documentary on 9-11, wherein the trail stops at the desk of a single, unnamed CIA manager. This means the information is there, but with a name will likely come an explanation that nobody is going to be happy about.

At the end of the day, 9-11 lies at the feet of Al Qaeda, not the CIA or FBI. The US Government has a lot of moving parts. The FBI and CIA operate under the US Constitution, and a long list of laws. Before September, 2001, the lines for the CIA and FBI were clearly drawn. Not like today, where the CIA is quietly passing intel to the DEA about drug shipments, but this fact is not disclosed in federal court. Not like today, where the FBI seems to investigate to the full extent of its abilities with a minimum of legal paperwork. All the abuses of the FBI and CIA in the news today (real or perceived) are a direct result of the USA Patriot Act, and the war on terror creeping into non-terrorist investigations.

The limits of the CIA and FBI prior to 9-11 have also been discussed at length on this board, long before I got here, and by much smarter people.

The so-called “Wall” pre-9/11 was between certain FISA-obtained methods pf intelligence gathering methods and criminal investigations. It was irrelevant to the Hazmi and Midhar case. There really was no legal or constitutional limitation as of early 2000 up until September 11, 2001 on the CIA telling the FBI’s National Security (ie, not Criminal) desks that two known al-Qaeda operatives were in the US (John O’Neill was in charge of the FBI’s National Security Division at its New York Field Office, but there was also the National Security staff at FBI Headquarters, and then-FBI Director Louis Freeh presumably would have been briefed about). Nor was there any restriction on telling the Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the White House Nature Security Council—ie., Richard Clarke.

And Clarke has publicly said that then-CIA Director George Tenet did not tell him about Hazmi and Midhar prior to 9/11 AND that the decision not to share outside the CIA would have come from the Director. Nor is there any evidence that Tenet told either of the relevant National Security Advisors (Sandy Berger and then Condi Rice), or Attorney Generals (Janet Reno and then John Ashcroft), or indeed, either President Clinton or President Bush about the two terrorists before the attacks.

So we know that the CIA knew about Hazmi and Midhar. We also know that the Saudis knew about Hazmi and Midhar. Yet there they were on AA Flight 77’s manifest on 9/11.

This cries out for explanation. Yet I agree, that unfortunately answers won’t be forthcoming. It’s only been (almost) 22 years.

 

[Axxman300]

The so-called “Wall” pre-9/11 was between certain FISA-obtained methods pf intelligence gathering methods and criminal investigations. It was irrelevant to the Hazmi and Midhar case. There really was no legal or constitutional limitation as of early 2000 up until September 11, 2001 on the CIA telling the FBI’s National Security (ie, not Criminal) desks that two known al-Qaeda operatives were in the US (John O’Neill was in charge of the FBI’s National Security Division at its New York Field Office, but there was also the National Security staff at FBI Headquarters, and then-FBI Director Louis Freeh presumably would have been briefed about). Nor was there any restriction on telling the Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the White House Nature Security Council—ie., Richard Clarke.

And yet when you talk to anyone at Langley or the Bureau who was there during the Clinton Administration they will tell you that while there was no specific restrictions with sharing intelligence between CIA and FBI, the management sure as hell implied there was to be no unauthorized back and forth. And there would be no authorizations, so don't bother asking. This was a result of the Aldrich Ames case, where Janet Reno had the FBI investigate the CIA breech instead of letting CIA deal with it internally. By 1998, the CIA's biggest enemy was the FBI, who'd left them gunshy, and over-cautious. This was why Alec Station was spun up in the first place, nobody at Langley wanted to be seen as aggressive. By running this pet Al Qaeda projects out of an annex kept things out of CIA's HQ.

And Alec Station was ultimately the problem, and the gatekeeper for that vital intel.