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New York Times/ The Saudi Connection to 9/11

  • 02-02-2020 1:28pm
    #1
    Closed Accounts Posts: 3,705 ✭✭✭


    New report from the New York times magazine. Previously unknown details about the 9/11 investigation. It about the FBI investigation and their efforts to find out if the Saudi government helped the 9/11 hijackers.

    Some high level; FBI agents were tracking different suspects across the world ( including in England) for over a decade and one time there is evidence CIA may have got involved in an investigation by the FBI to track two Saudi terrorists linked to 9/11, that got Visas, planning to come to America, and study in Oklahoma. FBI agents suspected they were planning something new and an operation inside the FBI was set up to track their movements when they arrived.


    CIA objected to the FBI plan. The CIA claimed their Saudis allies would not like it, if we walked them into a trap. New York Times claims.the Saudis were tipped off the top secret operation was in the works and two men did not come. The FBI suspected the Saudi Government was tipped off the FBI was going to do this!

    Did the CIA tell them?

    It like the 24 hour TV series, some of this stuff.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/magazine/9-11-saudi-arabia-fbi.html


Comments

  • Closed Accounts Posts: 3,705 ✭✭✭Cheerful Spring2


    The full story of the F.B.I.’s investigation into Saudi links to the 9/11 attacks has remained largely untold. Even the code name of the case — Operation Encore — has never been published before. This account is based on interviews with more than 50 current and former investigators, intelligence officials and witnesses in the case. It also draws on some previously secret documents as well as on the voluminous public files of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission.

    The Encore investigation exposed a bitter rift within the bureau over the Saudi connection. It illuminated a series of missed opportunities to resolve questions about links between one of Washington’s closest allies and the deadliest attack in the nation’s history. Richard Lambert, who led the F.B.I.’s initial 9/11


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 3,705 ✭✭✭Cheerful Spring2


    New York times confirms what I said here in the past.

    Even had the agent dug further, he might not have discovered that Shaikh’s boarders, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, were known Qaeda operatives whose names were in the databases of both the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency. While C.I.A. officials placed the two men under surveillance in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in early January 2000 and learned that at least one of them later flew to Los Angeles, the agency did not alert the F.B.I. to their presence until August 2001, a few weeks before the attacks.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 3,705 ✭✭✭Cheerful Spring2


    Even before Gonzalez found Abdullah, agents began searching for Bayoumi, the hijackers’ mysterious Saudi friend. His name turned up repeatedly — on bank documents and as the co-signer on their initial San Diego lease at the Parkwood Apartments where Bayoumi also lived. Bayoumi, 43, was already known to the F.B.I. An employee at his previous residence had contacted the field office to report some strange goings-on: large gatherings of young Arab men; a package that came from Saudi Arabia that had wires sticking out of it and no customs papers; some suspicious wiring that a maintenance man found under Bayoumi’s bathroom sink. In September 1998, the F.B.I. opened a preliminary counterterrorism investigation.

    Little about Bayoumi added up. Although he identified himself as a graduate student in business, he rarely went to class. He drew a monthly stipend from a Saudi contracting company, but the firm was a conduit for money coming from the Saudi Defense Ministry, where Bayoumi had worked in civil aviation. At local mosques, he was known as a glad-hander who often pulled out a video camera to record gatherings. Agents learned that many worshipers suspected he was a Saudi spy.


    Bayuomoi is one of guys who met the hijackers when they arrived in the United States. And helped them with money, housing, and flying lessons.
    ..................................................

    F.B.I. officials eventually came to share that view. “Our best assessment of him in San Diego was that he was a spy for the Saudis,” says Gore, who headed the office. But the bureau closed its preliminary inquiry in June 1999 without questioning Bayoumi. Even if he was doing intelligence work without the official cover of a diplomatic post, former F.B.I. officials say, he would probably not have been charged with any crime because he would have been spying for an allied government. Investigators also worried that a more aggressive pursuit of Bayoumi might tip off local men he knew who were suspects in another F.B.I. counterterrorism investigation.

    By the time the F.B.I. began searching for Bayoumi again, right after 9/11, he had decamped to Birmingham, England, with his wife and children. At the F.B.I.’s request, he was detained by agents of New Scotland Yard on Sept. 21, 2001. Although he was ostensibly studying for a doctorate in business ethics, his main job seemed to be running a Saudi student association. The kingdom’s security services often use such groups to monitor students for dissident activity.

    F.B.I. agents flew to Britain in the hope that they would be able to interview Bayoumi. If they gathered sufficient evidence, they thought, they might even be able to bring him back to the United States. Because of British police protocols, the F.B.I. agents were not allowed to speak with Bayoumi directly but instead had to forward their questions to the British detectives. Bayoumi was hardly a forthcoming witness. He claimed to have met the two hijackers by chance, after hearing them speaking gulf-accented Arabic in a small halal cafe in Culver City, Calif. When Mihdhar and Hazmi told him they didn’t like Los Angeles, Bayoumi said that he suggested San Diego. When they turned up a few days later, he claimed, he showed them the hospitality he would have accorded any Saudi brother.

    Such a casual acquaintance seemed at odds with the efforts Bayoumi made to help the two strangers. And given that Bayoumi claimed to be a mere graduate student, former F.B.I. officials told us that they were struck by what they say was pressure on British officials for his release by the Saudi Embassy in London. After a week — and before F.B.I. officials had a chance to fully review the documents and videotapes seized in a search of Bayoumi’s home — he was freed. He was not asked whether he had a relationship with Saudi intelligence.


  • Registered Users Posts: 80,741 ✭✭✭✭Overheal


    Fix your posts to show where you are ripping/plagiarizing text from the New York Times. /mod


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 3,705 ✭✭✭Cheerful Spring2


    Working with F.B.I. intelligence analysts, Smith began to see new patterns. Although the analysis remains secret, current and former officials who have reviewed it say that it illuminated the relationships among some important subjects of the investigation and revealed some previously unidentified contacts among the hijackers and their associates.

    The investigators knew, for example, that there had been numerous phone calls between the imam Thumairy and the suspected spy Bayoumi. But the new analysis pointed to a web of calls, meetings and travel that began in December 1999, less than a month before the hijackers’ arrival. Those communications involved Thumairy and Bayoumi, as well as a visiting Saudi government religious official who had hurriedly obtained a visa and then spent time in California with Bayoumi in the weeks before the hijackers flew to Los Angeles. Another figure in the web was the Yemeni-American cleric Awlaki, whom some agents suspected of acting as a spiritual adviser to the hijackers and helping them with logistics.

    In a trove of seemingly disorganized evidence taken from Bayoumi’s home in Birmingham, England, in 2001, the detective found a spiral notebook that contained a hand-drawn aviation diagram of a plane descending to strike a spot on the ground. An F.B.I. agent who had studied aeronautical engineering concluded that the diagram showed a formula for an aerial descent like the one performed by Flight 77, the jet that Hazmi and Mihdhar hijacked, before it struck the Pentagon

    The evidence shows this was Saudi government/ Al Qeada plot to hijack planes on 9/11.

    This a crucial bit of info.
    A partly declassified summary of the Encore case, written in 2012 by New York investigators cites “evidence” that a Saudi official whose name is redacted, “tasked al-Thumairy and al-Bayoumi with assisting the hijackers.” According to several people familiar with the document, it refers to a Saudi religious official with diplomatic status who served in the United States.

    A religious official with the Saudi Government directed al-Thumairy and al-Bayoumi to assist the hijackers plans. Did the Saudi reiligious official have a boss and who told him to do this? There layers to this conspiracy.


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  • Closed Accounts Posts: 3,705 ✭✭✭Cheerful Spring2


    Overheal wrote: »
    Fix your posts to show where you are ripping/plagiarizing text from the New York Times. /mod

    From the link I posted in first post.. I not claiming i wrote it.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 3,705 ✭✭✭Cheerful Spring2


    Overheal back so am leaving the forum again. I have enough of getting stupid warning about I Am trolling and more silly crap about stressing members and posters. When we get a new mod i return someday to this forum, bye everyone.


  • Registered Users Posts: 80,741 ✭✭✭✭Overheal


    Locking this as the OP ignored instruction and indicated they are abandoning the effort.


This discussion has been closed.
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