Transcript of The 9/11 Files: They Could Have Stopped It | Ep 3

The Bush administration did everything it possibly could to undermine an actual investigation into what happened on September 11th. But why? What were they trying to hide?

There's an old saying in Tennessee, I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee, that says, fool me once. Shame on you. If fool me, we can't get fooled again.

Well, for one thing, the United States had incredible intelligence on Bin Laden and his plans. Precise intelligence, actionable intelligence. On August 6, 2001, President Bush received a presidential daily briefing. Its title, literally, Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US. It continued, Al Qaeda members, including some who are US citizens, have resided in or traveled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks. And then it added this, FBI information indicates patterns of suspicious activity consistent with preparations for hijacking. Bin Laden was mentioned no fewer than 40 times in the President's Daily Intelligence Briefing. Cia Director George Tenet said that in the summer of 2001, the system was blinking red. So how far fetched was it that Al Qaeda might hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings? Not very far fetched, it turns out. In May 2001, an intelligence report concluded this. Operatives may hijack airplanes. The FAA The FAA issued a circular to Airlines, warning of heightened increase in hijackings. And then in July of 2001, the FAA issued another circular, this one noting that, Currently active terror groups were known to plan and trained for hijackings and were able to build and conceal explosives and luggage.

Between 1999 and 2001, NORAD, which defends North American airspace, simulated a foreign hijacked eyeliner crashing into a building in the United as part of a training exercise, and they were not alone. The National Reconoscence Office, a little-known intelligence agency that runs our spy satellites and remote-controlled surveillance planes, was planning an exercise in which an errant aircraft would crash into one of its buildings. That exercise was on September 11th, 2001, and planned to take place just a couple of miles from Dulles Airport. That's where the American Airlines Flight number 77 had taken off before it crashed into the Pentagon. In other words, the The idea of Al Qaeda hijacking an airplane and flying into a building was entirely plausible before 9/11. Officials knew it could happen, and there were other signs as well. During the presidential transition in 2000 and 2001, nine months before 9/11, Bill Clinton told President Bush, I think by far your greatest threat is Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. In January of 2001, Philip Zelleco, the future executive director of the 9/11 Commission, attended a briefing in which Condoleezza Rice, the future National Security Advisor, was warned by Sandy Berger, that would be Bill Clinton's outgoing National Security Advisor, that, The biggest national security threat facing this country is Al Qaeda.

On July 10th, 2001, the CIA director, George Tenet, and his counterterrorism Deputy, Jay Koffer-Black, were so alarmed by intelligence pointing to an impending attack by Al Qaeda that they demanded an emergency meeting at the White House with Condoleezza Rice and her Security Council staff. In In fact, on the morning of the attacks, Director of Central Intelligence, Tenet, told a US Senator, I wonder if it has anything to do with this guy taking pilot training. And of course, it did. By any measure, including according to the heavily biased commission report, George W. Bush, and particularly Condoleezza Rice, had ample warning that Al Qaeda was plotting an attack. And by all accounts, the US intel agencies were fully aware the hijackers were in the United States, and in fact, it helped at least two of them to the United States. Us intelligence was so strong at the time, on the morning of the attacks, the majority of the hijackers were flagged at the airport for additional screening. The question is, how did they wind up on the watch list in the first place? The report never tells us.

My name is Mike Scheuer. I worked at the CIA for 22 years. And from 1995 until 1999, I was chief of the Osama bin Laden unit. I would say it was 1983. '93 to 1992. I worked on Afghanistan. I worked on the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Bin Laden was a popular name during the war against the Soviets. We knew he was fighting in Afghanistan with the Mujdatin. He was the poster boy for Jihad in Saudi Arabia, so he was well known throughout the Arab world.

Osam bin Laden was born in 1957 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, into a well-connected and wealthy family. He was one of 50 siblings. His father built a multi-billion dollar construction business, reconstructing, among other things, the cities of Mecca and Medina. In 1979, Osam bin Laden moved to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet invasion there. After the war, he returned to Saudi Arabia, but he was eventually exiled to Sudan because he was openly critical of the Saudi government's close ties to the United States. In 1996, he returned to Afghanistan and declared war on the US.

In 1996, Bin Laden announced what he said was his Declaration of War against the United States. It's a very compelling document to this day because it doesn't have anything to do with what the American people were told about either Islam or Al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden.

America was targeted for attack because we're the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world.

The basis of the Declaration of War from him was, Get out of our land. That It was a compelling message within a Middle Eastern framework that had been dominated by the United States government and the Israelis since the end of World War II.

Since then, the United States has been repeatedly attacked in the region.

Now, the fanatics behind this bomb have given the French soldiers and their American counterparts 10 days to leave Lebanon or die.

In 1983, a group called Islamic Jihad murdered more than 300 US Marines at a military barracks in Beirut. At the time, it was the largest non a clear explosion since Nagasaki.

The four-story concrete building collapsed in a pile of rubble. More than 200 of the sleeping men were killed in that one hideous, insane attack.

In 1993, a Pakistani national called Ramsey Youssef bombed the World Trade Center in Lora Manhattan.

The key question now, was this a one-off attack or the start of a campaign of bombing?

By 1996, Al Qaeda had emerged as the single clearest threat to the United States. In response to that threat, the CIA created something called Al station, otherwise known as the Bin Laden Unit, which Mike Scheuer ran. But as it turned out, not everyone at the CIA wanted to help fight Al Qaeda.

We wanted some basic information about Osama bin Laden, his bank accounts, his health, his information, his educational information, the very basic things. We kept sending a message because it was important. We were building a base of data. And so the COS in Saudi Arabia at the time, John Brennan, we didn't know if he was dealing with them on the issue or not. And so we finally sent a message that said, didn't say pretty please, but said, please do this as quickly as possible. He called Tenant. And that was the end of that. Don't send Brennan any more of these notes. So whatever the reason was, I don't know. But if you identify a liaison service who you know has information you need, it's not impossible to persuade them to do it since we defend Saudi Arabia, especially in that case. We were told not to send any more cables on that issue to Riyadh. Just because I was the Chief of Operations on Osama bin Laden didn't mean there wasn't somebody else working on the same issue in an opposite direction. And as it turned out, the opposite The direction carried the day with the approval of presidents.

As Brennan was withholding critical information on bin Laden, the CIA's counterterrorism center started developing a plan to capture bin Laden at a terrorist training facility known as Tarnak Farms.

Tarnak Farms is where he lived. We knew Osama bin Laden, his family, Zawahiri's family, and a couple of others, the most senior Al Qaeda people were going to be there. And initially, the administration went along with it.

The plan was finalized with the help of friendly Afghan tribal leaders. It was even rehearsed twice in the United States in late 1997. All it needed was approval from the White House. On March 7, 1998, Richard Clarke, who headed the Interagency counterterror Security Group, described the plan as embryonic to then National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, even as the CIA was conducting its third rehearsal of the action. Military officers in the Pentagon reviewed the plan, and despite some mild misgivings that could have been attributed to interdepartmental rivalries, they generally expressed their satisfaction. They supported it. Legal justifications were prepared in advance from the CIA to the NSC for approval. The attorney general of the United States, the FBI director, and the US attorney for the Southern district of New York, where Bin Laden was to be tried if he was captured alive, were all briefed on the plan. The CIA ran a fourth rehearsal between May 20th and May 24th, with the expectation that the plan would be executed in late June of that year and no later than late July. And yet less than a week later, the CIA's assets in the field were informed that the operation had been suspended by the Clinton administration.

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When we wrote the operational plan, you have to keep in mind, speaking to the policymaker, you have to keep in mind that They have their families there. And if there is violence, if they don't surrender, there's liable to be people killed, non-combatants. They said, Okay, we'll go ahead with it. So that one went almost to the starting gate. And one of the last dumps of overhead imagery we got happened to show a child swing set, and they suddenly said, Oh, we can't do that. What if that picture gets out and we'll be responsible?

A clear pattern emerged throughout Scheuer's tenure at Alex Station. Whenever there was a chance to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, the Clinton administration chose not to do it.

We had an operation that was planned to kidnap Bin Laden within Afghanistan.

The plan was supposed to unfold just days before Al Qaeda bombed the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

It was a plan that required getting him out of the country and then taking him to another country. And it was approved. And then at a last minute, it was unapproved. And then a week later, the embassies went up.

The greatest fear tonight is that what has happened here will herald some alarming new phase in international terrorism.

About 4: 00 in the morning, George Tenet, who was the DCI at the time, calls my office number, and I pick it up and said, Yep, Scheuer. I said, Yeah. And somebody else put him on. And he said, Can we revive that program? The President wants to know if we can revive the program on the capture operation. By Tenet's words, realized they missed an opportunity, perhaps to stop the operation. But that got to be a habit throughout the rest of my career there.

Less than two weeks after the attacks, Clinton launched cruise missiles at targets he said were associated with bin Laden.

Today, I ordered our armed forces to to strike at terrorist-related facilities in Afghanistan and Sudan. Our mission was clear to strike at the network of radical groups affiliated with and funded by Usama bin Laden.

But the strike was worthless. In fact, it was embarrassing. The Pentagon targeted suspected terrorist training facilities in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, which US intelligence falsely claimed was making chemical weapons. The pattern became clearer over time. The CIA would offer a to capture or kill Bin Laden, and then somebody would call off the strike at the last moment.

To me, it's a mystery. To me, going after Osama bin Laden was hard work, but it could have been accomplished by '97. Then from '97 till I left in '99, there were 10 more opportunities, and none of them were taken advantage. Kill, capture, whatever the government wanted to do.

And the chances kept coming. In May of 1999, US intelligence services had a credible lead that Bin Laden was at his compound Kandahar, Afghanistan. Officials in both the US military and the CIA agreed this was the best opportunity they could hope for to kill Bin Laden. They had at least three opportunities to strike, but they never did.

Somebody got wet feet.

Scheuer was removed from his role running Alex Station in 1999. He was replaced with a figure called Richard Blee, who barely comes up in the 9/11 Commission report. On October 12, 2000, the failure to act in Bin Laden caught up to the agency and with our country, When the USS Cole, a destroyer anchored in Aden Yemen, was attacked by a suicide bomber.

Killed 17 soldiers on the USS Cole.

17 American servicemen died, but this time, the government didn't strike anyone or anything in retaliation. The official reason given by the report for the lack of action was that the administration lacked definitive proof that Al Qaeda was responsible for the terror attack.

We knew right away it was Osama bin Laden. Then I hear Clinton on the or on the television saying, Well, my experts, my team, my intelligence community says we can't be sure if it's Osama bin Laden or not, or Al Qaeda or not. And we just stood there and said, No, what is he? What is he talking about?

In this case, the 9/11 Commission offers excuses for Clinton, cite an absurd blame game with Clinton administration officials who claimed they were waiting for the legal go ahead from the CIA and the FBI die. But at the same time, then CIA Director George Tenet is reported to have said that he was surprised to hear the White House was awaiting a conclusion from him on responsibility for the coal attack. Everyone already knew who did it.

My impression over the course of my career, after over 22 years is that the first thing the Seventh Floor ever considered when you brought them in operation to approve was what if we fail and how will we get roast by the media?

It took Bill Clinton just 13 days to respond to the embassy bombings. But for some reason, a reason that has never been explained, he had no response at all to the attack on the USS coal. Even more bizarre in telling is the Bush administration's explanation for why it didn't respond. It was most Clearly articulated by the NEO con number 2 at the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz. He described the coal bombing as stale by the time Bush took office. It was just five months after the terror attacks. Wolfowitz wanted something bigger to respond to, and soon he got it.

It was remarkable to watch this, especially after the man had declared war on us, reiterated it, said, your time is coming. We hadn't had a friend like that in terms of divulging what their true mission was since General Jiapp. And we didn't listen to him and look where Eric got us. And look where we are now. Not only 9/11, but we lost another war to the Afghans.

If you want to understand why and how 9/11 happened, the years to look at, most closely, are 1999 to 2001. Those years coincided with George Tenet's implementation of what became known simply as The Plan. To formulate this effort, CIA Director Tenet elevated a man called Koffer Black, a former spy who'd risen to head CIA stations in the Sudan and elsewhere, to Director of the Counter Terrorism Center. To give you an idea of Khofer Black's character, in 2017, he joined Hunter Biden on the Board of Directors of Burizma, Ukrainian gas company. But at that time, in late 1999, the core of the future 9/11 hijackers were gathering in Afghanistan.

These 22 individuals do not account for all the terrorist activity in the world, but they're among the most dangerous. The leaders and key supporters, the planners and strategists. They must be found.

Here's a summary of some of the warnings they had. In December 1999, a 23-year-old Algerian man called Ahmed Rousam attempted to cross with a rental car on the ferry from Victoria, British Columbia to Port Angeles, Washington State. Thanks to alert border security in Port Angeles, Rousam was apprehended with hundreds of pounds of explosives in his car. His plan had been to set off a car bomb at LAX on January first, 2000. But the biggest warning signs of an appending attack in the United States came in the summer of 2001, just months or weeks before. On April 20th, 2001, a briefing to top Bush administration officials noted that Bin Laden planned multiple operations. In May 2001, a report was distributed to Bush administration officials, noting that Bin Laden public profile may presage attack. On May 16, 2001, an intel report mentioned a phone call to an embassy that Bin Laden supporters were planning an attack inside the United States. On June 12th, a CIA report indicated that Khalid Sheik Mohamed was recruiting people to travel to the US, possibly to aid in terror attacks. On June 22nd of that year, the CIA notified station chiefs about intelligence suggesting an Al Qaeda suicide bombing in the United States could be on the way.

At about the same time, US intelligence issued a terror advisory threat indicating a high probability of near-term spectacular terrorist attacks, resulting in numerous casualties. On June 25th, George W. Bush's counterterrorism, Tsar Richard Clarke, told Condoleezza Rice that six intelligence reports showed Al Qaeda personnel warning of an impending terror attack. Three days later, he told Rice that something very, very, very, very big was about to happen. On June 30th, top US intel officials were warned Bin Laden planning high-profile attacks of catastrophic proportion. In July, intelligence reports of an impending attack reached a fever pitch that led to the closure of US embassies in the Middle East. None of this apparently got the attention of the White House. Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, the man who thought the coal bombing was, quote, stale, questioned the reporting in a conversation with Bush's Deputy National Security Advisor. On July 12, 2001, acting FBI director Thomas Picard opened attorney general John Ashcroff's intelligence briefing with the latest on the CIA warnings about an Al Qaeda attack. Ashcroff responded by saying, I don't want you to ever talk to me about Al Qaeda, about these threats. I don't want to hear about Al Qaeda anymore.

Picard appealed for more counterterror enhancements, meaning funding. An appeal the attorney general denied on September 10th, the United States was attacked the very next day. By lying to the American public serially and aggressively, the CIA, the Bush administration, and the 9/11 Commission created the perfect condition for conspiracy theories to thrive. Consider, for example, the established fact that in the days before the attack, there was a huge surge in put options against airline stocks. Who, beside Al Qaeda knew the attacks were coming, and who specifically profited from these trades. It seems possible, probably likely, that foreign governments, including supposed allies, knew the plot was coming. Why didn't they warn the United States? And why did US authorities rush to ship all the debris from the attacks abroad, almost immediately, making it impossible for engineers to study the crime scene? Those are just some of the questions we will address in the next installment of our series.