Synthetic Terrorism: Why Did CIA Cover Up The Presence of 9-11 Hijackers In The US?

"CIA Shadow Wars" (Illustration by AK Rockefeller)

By Ryan Dube
In January of 2000, the CIA monitored a meeting of top al Qaeda operatives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and then followed, after the meeting, the men who would become the lead hijackers of Flight 77 – Khalid Al Mihdhar and Nawaf Al Hazmi – before losing them in Bangkok. Then, on March 5th, 2000, CIA Bangkok Station reported back to headquarters that both Mihdhar and Hazmi had arrived in Los Angeles.

[Former US Counter Intelligence official Richard] Clarke, told the filmmakers that the CIA did not relay that information to anyone. The reason they chose to withhold such information – information that could have saved countless lives – remains a mystery.

Someone Blocked The Information
According to Clarke, someone at a high level intentionally went into the system and literally disabled the distribution of the cables that revealed evidence of Mihdhar and Hazmi’s arrival in the U.S.

When asked whether those three top CIA officials had opportunities to alert Clarke to the VISAs and other evidence revealing their presence in the U.S., Clarke responded:

They did, but they wouldn’t have had to, because unless somebody intervened to stop the normal, automatic distribution, I’d automatically get it. For me, to this day, it is inexplicable why when I had every other detail related to terrorism, that the Director didn’t tell me, that the Director of the Counterterrorism Center didn’t tell me, that the other 48 people in CIA who knew about it never said anything to me or anyone in my staff, in a period of over 12 months? We therefore concluded that there was a high level decision in the CIA, ordering people not to share that information.

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