Transcripts:
The 9/11 Commission failed to fulfill the single task it was charged with: explaining how 9/11 happened and why. Instead, it lied. But the 9/11 Commission did achieve another goal. Bush is winning, baby! It protected the Bush administration, which went on to win a resounding reelection victory in the 2004 elections.
It also provided a basis to radically transform our country and our way of life in the United States. The final 70 pages of the 9/11 report detail a long list of recommended reforms. Those so-called reforms radically expanded the power of the very same agencies that failed to protect the United States from the terror attacks.
With my signature, this law will give intelligence and law enforcement officials important new tools to fight a present danger. Some of those changes, like the Patriot Act, passed before the commission even issued its report. We did not need new laws to allow wiretapping and surveillance because in all of the channels for the FBI, CIA, NSA, DIA, we had every bit of information we needed to stop the terrorists.
Kristen Breitweiser is a lawyer. She's also a 9/11 widow who has spent decades pushing for accountability for what happened on 9/11. The attacks 100% should have been prevented, could have been prevented. The U.S. government had everything it needed to stop the attacks.
And yet, rather than blame the agencies for their obvious failures, Congress gave the deep state power to access your business records, including your library and bookstore records, with minimal to no judicial oversight, as if you did something wrong. Congress permitted roving wiretaps of multiple phones without specifying a specific target.
Congress authorized unconstitutional searches of homes and businesses without any notification at all. Congress created something called National Security Letters, which enabled the FBI to get personal records without any court's approval and also gave the FBI power to issue gag orders so you couldn't tell anyone they were doing this. We were already wiretapping and doing surveillance just fine before the Patriot Act.
So again, the attacks could have been prevented 100%. We had all the information we needed to stop the attacks. We had the hijackers fully identified. We knew exactly where they were going, and we knew what they were up to. We knew that the Patriot Act, FISA warrants, they're not needed because we already had all the information we needed before 9/11 to stop the attacks.
In 2007, the National Security Agency created the PRISM program that conducted warrantless surveillance of your phone calls, your emails, and your Internet activity. Much of this surveillance was conducted on American citizens who'd done nothing wrong. My name is John Kiriakou, K-I-R-I-A-K-O-U. I'm a former CIA counterterrorism officer, former chief of counterintelligence in Alec Station. And I was in the CIA Counterterrorism Center on 9/11 within hours of the attacks. In retrospect, it's much more clear.
The CIA changed from an intelligence service who saw its job as recruiting spies to steal secrets and then to analyze those secrets so policymakers could make the best informed policy, to a paramilitary organization whose job it was to capture and/or kill anybody who could pose a threat to the United States.
I went to Pakistan as the chief of CIA counterterrorism operations in January of 2002, and I was given no specific orders. So on my very first day in Pakistan, I went to see the station chief, and I said, "What do you want me to do?" And he said, "I want you to come up with a plan to take down a terrorist safe house.
" I went back to my desk with a legal pad and thought to myself, "All right, what would I do to take down a terrorist safe house?" And I wrote at the top of the page, "0200," because I would want it to be dark. And then I thought, "Well, 9/11 is still an open criminal investigation, so I'd have to invite the FBI along, and I would have to invite the Pakistani intelligence service because, after all, it's their country.
" I figured I would need battering rams, guns, ammunition, walkie-talkies, a satellite dish, encrypted communications, all different sorts of things, which I ordered on my CIA credit card. It arrived just days later in Pakistan. But the idea was we take the battering ram, we break down the door, and we grab everybody inside and then lock them up in whatever local jail happened to be the nearest.
And so that's what we started to do. In our first operation, we found two Tunisian teenagers, both 18 or 19 years old. They both burst into tears. One asked if he could call his mother. And it was almost disarming. It was shocking that this was the fearsome Al-Qaeda that we were so afraid of.
And then we started doing more of these, from one a week to two a week to three a week. Sometimes we would do two in a night. And we started capturing more and more important people. Members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, for example, members of Uzbek extremist groups. And so we would just take them to the Rawalpindi jail in the nearby city of Rawalpindi.
We got to the point where we actually filled the Rawalpindi jail. There was just no room to squeeze one more Al-Qaeda fighter in it. And so my Pakistani counterpart came to me and said, "Look, the jail's full. You have to get these guys out." I didn't know what to do with them, so I called CIA headquarters.
I said, "The Paks want these Al-Qaeda guys out. What do I do with them?" And I was told to put them on a transport plane and send them to Guantanamo. I said, "Guantanamo, Cuba?" "Why would we send them to Cuba?" And my colleague in Washington said, "Well, we've come up with a plan." The plan was to detain hundreds of people, including U.S. citizens, without formal charges or any trial.
This was a multi-pronged plan do detain prisoners, indefinitely, to carry out torture on some of them, which at the time were called enhanced interrogation techniques, and to either render or extraordinarily render others. Things are changing here in America, too.
The 9/11 Commission recommended creating a new super spy called the Director of National Intelligence and placing that person inside the White House. They insisted on expanding the TSA, which now degrades millions of innocent air travelers with full-body scans, pat-downs, luggage screenings, and multiple unconstitutional searches every time they enter an airport. The explanation for these changes was that they would keep America safe.
But most of the intelligence that was gathered from detainees was obtained through illegal torture, justified by a 2002 DOJ torture memo, which greenlit the use of waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, and small-space confinement for interrogations. Think of it this way. In 1946, we executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American prisoners of war, right? Waterboarding was a death penalty crime.
In January of 1968, the Washington Post ran a front-page photograph of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner. On the morning that that picture was published, the Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara, ordered an investigation. The soldier was arrested. He was charged with torture. He was convicted and sentenced to 20 years at hard labor at Fort Leavenworth.
The law never changed. But somehow, in 2002, like magic, the George W. Bush administration's attorneys at the Justice Department, the CIA, and the National Security Council decided we didn't have to pay any attention to that law. And because we were the good guys, we could do anything we wanted. And that's how the torture program came to be. The CIA set up secret black sites to conduct torture around the world.
There were sites in Afghanistan, Poland, Romania, Thailand, and many other countries. Many of these places were so secret that the presidents and prime ministers of the countries that they were in had no idea that there was a secret CIA prison in their country. These were handshake deals between George Tenet, the director of the CIA, and whoever happened to be director of the intelligence service in those countries.
The reason why there were so many of them was not because we had so many prisoners that we needed multiple locations. It's that word was bound to leak out that these places existed. And so if word leaked out about prison A, well, by then, all the prisoners had been moved to prison B. Most of what we know about the Al-Qaeda plans for 9/11 was obtained through torture.
The part of the commission's report that talks about the plot, the actual story of how the hijackers met, how the plan was devised, comes from, quote, unquote, "questioning" of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who were two detainees that were in custody. It was based on torture.
Anyone who knows anything about torture knows that any information gleaned through torture is not reliable. It's not credible. The CIA knew full well that the information it was gathering wasn't credible. Detainees made false confessions under pressure. Those detainees included 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is probably the best example here. He confessed to, for example, murdering Daniel Pearl.
Daniel Pearl was a Wall Street Journal reporter who came to Pakistan in early 2002. He was there to meet with a Pakistani extremist with whom he had been emailing for about six months. He went on to do the interview, and months later, his head was found in a vacant lot. His torso was found on the other side of town. Well, we know who killed Daniel Pearl.
He was arrested. He confessed. He pointed the Pakistani authorities to Daniel Pearl's torso, and he was sentenced to life in prison. But Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, during torture at the hands of CIA officers, also confessed to killing Daniel Pearl. We knew he didn't kill Daniel Pearl, but the torture was so severe, he was telling his CIA interviewers, interrogators, anything that he thought they wanted to hear just to get them to stop torturing him. What was true and what wasn't true, we'll never know the answer to that question.
But remarkably, many details of the CIA's torture program are still not publicly acknowledged. They're still secret. Waterboarding has received the most media attention. It's actually quite simple. You strap a prisoner to a board. His feet and legs are elevated compared to his face. Cloth or burlap or something is put in his mouth to keep him from drowning. And while his head is immobilized, water is poured on his mouth.
So, of course, water's going to get through the cloth and get down your throat, and it makes you feel like you're drowning. It causes panic. You tense your muscles to the point where it becomes painful. And in the case of one prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Hussein, he actually did drown.
His heart stopped beating, and he had to be revived by a CIA doctor performing CPR so that he could be tortured more. I never thought waterboarding was the worst technique. I thought that there were others that were worse. Now, the easiest technique was called the attention grasp. You grab somebody by the shirt and say, "Answer my questions." That's not torture. The second one was a slap on the belly, called the belly slap.
It makes a cracking sound. It's a little bit humiliating. It leaves a handprint. It's probably not torture. The third one was a slap across the face. That's humiliating. But again, reasonable people can agree to disagree about whether it's torture. But then they got progressively worse. The next one was called walling, where you roll a towel and put the towel around the prisoner's neck, and then you slam him repeatedly into a plywood wall.
The plywood has a little bit of give, and the towel ensures that the prisoner doesn't get whiplash. But the CIA never used a towel, and the wall was made out of concrete block. And so they did such damage to prisoners that several of them have permanent traumatic brain injury and are unable to participate in their own defenses. The Justice Department never said you could smash somebody's head against a concrete wall until his brain was jelly.
But that's exactly what the CIA did. There were others that were even worse. One was called the cold cell, where a prisoner is stripped naked, he's chained to an eyebolt in the ceiling so he can't get comfortable. He can't sit or kneel or lay. He's standing 24 hours a day. The cell is chilled to 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
And then every hour, a CIA officer goes into the cell and throws a bucket of ice water on him. Now, we murdered prisoners using that technique. And again, the Justice Department never said, "Feel free to just murder these people by freezing them to death and giving them hypothermia." That's exactly what the CIA did.
There was another one that was actually quite controversial, and that was sleep deprivation. In the now unclassified legal memo in which Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed off on counter-resistance techniques at Gitmo in interrogations, Rumsfeld responded to the sleep deprivation technique by saying, "I stand at my desk for 8 to 10 hours a day.
Why is standing limited for four hours?" But the CIA wasn't talking about keeping people awake at their standup desks for 24 hours. What they would do to these prisoners is again, strip them naked, chain them to an eyebolt in the ceiling with industrial-strength lights on them 24 hours a day and death metal blasting at a volume of 11, 24 hours a day.
They went crazy after a few days of that and then just began to die publicly The Bush administration pretended none of this was happening. They lied. This government does not torture people. I said to my wife, who was also a senior CIA officer, "He is a bald-faced liar.
He is looking the American people directly in the eye and he's lying to them!" We've got a new partner. It's a company called Cowboy Colostrum. It's a brand that is serious about actual health, and the product is designed to work with your body, not against your body. It is a pure and simple product, all natural. Unlike other brands, Cowboy Colostrum is never diluted.
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In October of 2001, a CIA officer, and it's still unclear after all those years who that person was, introduced two outside psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, to the Director of the CIA, and they pitched to him over this dinner their idea of enhanced interrogation techniques. They wrote this up as a memo that was referred to the CIA's covert action staff. The covert action staff approved it and sent it to the CIA General Counsel's office.
The General Counsel liked the idea and sent it to the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department. They approved it, despite the fact that torture was specifically outlawed from 1945. They approved it and sent it to the National Security Council General Counsel. After his signature, it went to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.
And after Rice approved it, it went to the president. And as soon as the president signed it, the CIA began torturing its prisoners. At its peak, Guantanamo Bay held 780 detainees. I remember at the time thinking, "You know, these guys have been in Guantanamo for a long time, and we're not hearing anything about trials or jury selection or federal charges or anything.
" And a colleague said to me, "Oh, the vice president nixed that." It was Vice President Dick Cheney who decided or realized or concluded that while at Guantanamo, these men had no rights. To this day, almost none of them has been charged with a crime. The vast majority of them are innocent. Upwards of 80 or 85% of the people that we had at Guantanamo were innocent people who were scooped up in these dragnets. Most of them were Afghan citizens or Pakistani citizens who were involved in disputes with neighbors.
maybe Maybe they had loaned money to a neighbor and the neighbor didn't want to pay it back. So he would call the Americans and say, "Hey, my neighbor is Al-Qaeda." The U.S. Army or the CIA grabs the guy, puts him on a flight to Guantanamo, and nobody ever sees him again. On December 10, 2007, John Kiriakou became a whistleblower. He told ABC News about the torture policies.
In an interview with ABC News, I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners, that torture was official U.S. government policy. It was not the result of a rogue, and that the policy had been personally approved by the president. The government responded immediately with viciousness and ferocity.
They treated Kiriakou much tougher than the Clinton administration had ever treated Osama bin Laden. Within 24 hours, the CIA filed a document with the FBI called a Crimes Report, saying that I had disclosed classified information to the media. That's a crime under the Espionage Act. The FBI investigated me from December of 2007 until December of 2008. And in December of 2008, they sent my attorneys something called a declination letter, declining to prosecute me.
They said that torture was a crime and that we have a law in the United States that says you cannot classify a crime for the purpose of keeping the information from the American people. And so I was not charged with a crime. Three weeks later, Barack Obama became president, and he named John Brennan deputy national security advisor for counterterrorism.
John Brennan was one of the godfathers of the CIA's torture program. And he sent a memo to Eric Holder saying, "Charge him with espionage." Eric Holder wrote back and said, "My people don't think he committed espionage." And Brennan wrote back again to Holder saying, "Charge him anyway and make him defend himself.
" I had no idea that my phones were tapped, that my emails were being intercepted, or that teams of FBI agents were following me everywhere I went for the next three years. And finally, in January of 2012, I was arrested by the FBI and charged with five felonies, including three counts of espionage, which in many cases is a death penalty charge.
In the end, Kiriakou was the only person at the CIA to go to prison for anything related to 9/11. His crime: telling the truth about what the CIA was doing. In fact, despite the CIA's previously unknown role in recruiting the hijackers and their relentless stonewalling of the 9/11 Commission, the CIA was, on net, maybe the biggest winner from 9/11.
In a perverse way, 9/11 is one of the best things that ever happened to the CIA for a number of reasons. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, CIA Director Tenet offered a novel approach to taking out the Taliban: just use the CIA. And it worked. The CIA was the first U.S. agency to deploy to Afghanistan that year.
A paramilitary team called Jawbreaker arrived in Afghanistan on September 26, 2001. The first... A handful of teams that were sent to Afghanistan were sent there specifically to liaise with the Northern Alliance, to push the Taliban out of power, and to capture or kill every Al-Qaeda fighter they could encounter.
That extended then to Pakistan by the end of the year 2001. The context here is important. After the end of the Cold War, it wasn't exactly clear what the CIA would do. They'd spent 40 years fighting the Soviets. What next? In the mid-90s, President Bill Clinton, who was really no fan of the CIA, cut the CIA's budget.
And that was the first time that the CIA had had a budget cut since the Carter administration in the late 1970s. On the day after 9/11, the CIA got a budget supplement, of 10 figures. The amount is still classified, but I actually went up to the... to the Counterterrorism Center chief, Cofer Black at the time, this was about five, six days after 9/11. And I said, "Cofer, I have an idea for an operation that I want to put past you.
" And he put up his hands and he said, "Whatever it is, just do it. I have so much money, I can't possibly spend it all." So we all began flying business class all over the world. There are famous stories of CIA officers throwing sacks of money out of the side of helicopters, which gave rise to a joke at the agency that you can't buy an Afghan warlord, but you can certainly rent one. And that's what we were doing.
The CIA provided millions of dollars in direct cash payment to anti-Taliban groups, along with weapons and communications support. By November 2001, it was the CIA's Special Activities Division, not the U.S. military, that had taken Kabul and the fortress called Mazar-i-Sharif. The CIA targeted bin Laden as early as December 2001.
But as was so often the case during the tenure of George Tenet, the CIA failed to capture bin Laden. Tenet became CIA director in 1997, just as bin Laden was issuing his first fatwa against the United States. A leader with integrity would have resigned in shame after missing obvious warnings about a major attack. But Tenet had no shame.
The additional resources and powers the CIA received did not lead to better outcomes. On March 20, 2003, the U.S. invaded Iraq. It did so based on false intelligence that came from, yes, the CIA, run by George Tenet. The United States knows that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. It was all lies. But in Washington, failure is seen as success and rewarded.
By 2015, the CIA's public budget had risen to $15 billion, 500% higher than it was in the mid-1990s when they were fighting for post-Cold War relevance. And by the way, that's simply the public budget. Much of the CIA's funding remains classified. The FBI was also rewarded for failing to protect America. By 2023, the FBI's budget was almost $11 billion.
That's up from $3.3 billion the year of the 9/11 attacks. But none of it made America safer. Before 9/11, Silicon Valley had the highest concentration of millionaires anywhere in America. But post-9/11, Washington, D.C. has the highest concentration of millionaires anywhere in America. And it's because Congress put so many billions upon billions of dollars in counterterrorism and in intelligence, including in literally thousands of federal contractors called beltway bandits, that everybody got rich.
After the attacks, the FBI radically shifted agent resources to its top priorities. Those were counterterrorism and counterintelligence and cybercrime. Traditional crime fighting took a backseat. The FBI's drug program has sustained by far the largest reduction in FBI agent workforce: about 550 positions, or more than 80% of the non-supervisory field agents who were permanently reprogrammed.
Not surprisingly, this reduction in drug fighting aligned with the deadliest drug epidemic in American history. More than a million Americans died. I am not only not a conspiracy theorist, I'm about as far away from being a conspiracy theorist as a person can be. But I'm also a realist, and I made the first half of my career at the CIA as an analyst. And to come to an analytic judgment, you have to look at the evidence.
Well, the evidence surrounding 9/11 says that there is a far greater story there than we have been led to believe. Many of the people involved in this story should be in prison today, but of course, they're not. That's the real story of 9/11. It's the story of winners and losers. On the day of the attacks, the losers were the 2,977 civilians who were murdered.
It was the children who found out their parents weren't coming home, the New Yorkers who witnessed the smoke rising from their city. It was the firemen and cops who rushed into the towers to save those trapped inside and died in the aftermath of the attack. The losers were the nearly 7,000 U.S. service members who were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and the 52,000 who were wounded in action there.
The losers are the American people The rest of us who lived in a country permanently transformed, stripped of its fundamental constitutional rights, were $7 trillion poorer with nothing to show for it. Abroad, the losers were even more numerous. Nearly 5 million people were killed in the post-9/11 wars, most of them civilian. Entire countries were destroyed.
The world was destabilized. And then there were the winners. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, President George W. Bush enjoyed the highest approval ratings in the history of modern politics. He leveraged that popularity to launch a decade of regime-change wars.
In 2002, he defied the odds in the midterm elections and expanded his party's majority in the Congress. In 2004, he became the first Republican presidential candidate in decades to win reelection with a majority of the popular vote. When Bush arrived in office in 2000, he was worth about $20 million. Today, some estimates say he's worth more than $50 million. Bush lives in Texas today. He spends most of his time painting and riding his bike.
National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who spent most of 2001 ignoring the steady stream of very clear warnings about an imminent terror attack, got a promotion. In 2005, she became the Secretary of State. She received the overwhelming support from the United States Senate.
Since then, Rice has enriched herself by serving on numerous corporate boards and is director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where she is a professor. Disgraced CIA Director George Tenet, meanwhile, retired from the CIA in 2004, about a year after he provoked the invasion of Iraq. He got a sinecure as a professor at Georgetown University. Not surprisingly, he authored multiple books. And as so many in the CIA do, he joined the board of directors of multiple defense contractors.
Tenet also spent more than a decade at an investment bank. After leaving the CIA, he was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush. That's the nation's highest civilian honor. John Brennan, the Saudi station chief who helped the hijackers get their passports, blocked Alec Station from getting basic biographical details about Osama bin Laden, and personally worked to ensure that John Kiriakou ended up going to prison for telling the truth about what the CIA was doing, ended up running the CIA itself. He was appointed by Barack Obama to be director.
While running the CIA, Brennan was caught hacking the computers of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Brennan lied about that and never faced consequences for that lie. After leaving the CIA, he played a central role in the Russiagate hoax that dominated Donald Trump's first term. He obtained a sinecure at the University of Texas and became an MSNBC contributor.
Cofer Black, who ran the counterterrorism center, left the public sector for a successful career as a defense contractor. In 2017, maybe inevitably, he joined Hunter Biden on the board of Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company. Paul Wolfowitz, the Pentagon official who began calling for an invasion of Iraq just hours after the 9/11 attacks, ended up getting the war he wanted. He also got a promotion.
In 2005, Paul Wolfowitz became the president of the World Bank. He resigned two years later during a corruption scandal. In 2016, Paul Wolfowitz endorsed Hillary Clinton. And finally, there's Philip Zelikow, the man behind the dishonest commission report. After finishing his time as executive director of the commission, Zelikow got what he always wanted: more power.
His good friend Condoleezza Rice rewarded him for the work he did on the commission. Zelikow became counselor of the State Department, where he acted as Rice's deputy. He has since served on too many boards to mention. He's also served as an advisor to the Obama administration and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Zelikow is a professor at the University of Virginia, where he served as dean of the graduate school.
His work on the commission masterfully avoided any form of accountability or blame for the attacks. It was, from beginning to end, a lie. In the end, Zelikow blamed the government's failures on a "failure of imagination." Not surprisingly, imagination has never been indicted for it. It's been more than 20 years now.
We still don't know the simple truth about 9/11, but we can know a new commission could find out. An honest commission, a nonpartisan commission, a commission dedicated to protecting the United States could find out. It could answer the questions that have hung in the air since that day. What role did John Brennan play in facilitating the attacks? Why did he seem to be working for the hijackers? What CIA official made the decision to attempt to recruit those hijackers? Why did the Bush administration ignore dozens of clear warning signs? Why did the Clinton administration repeatedly refuse to kill or capture Osama bin Laden?
Who made the decision to ship the rubble from 9/11 off Manhattan and out of the country before an investigation could be done? Why did Tower 7 collapse even though it was hit by no airplane? What's in the NSA files that the commission never bothered to check? Which investors profited from the attacks? The government knows the name of the investor who profited from the attacks, who knew they were coming.
Why haven't they told us? And in the end, who benefited most from 9/11? What foreign countries benefited from 9/11? What did foreign intel services know about the attacks before they happened? A commission could find these answers. That commission would have broad subpoena power, enough funding and personnel to get those answers.
After more than 20 years, the American people have a right, an absolute right to those answers. They should be outraged by the lying, and they should demand to know what actually happened on September 11th. This episode concludes the 9/11 Files. Thank you for watching.
We made this series because the American people, particularly the families, the victims, but really all of us, all of us who lived in this nation that was totally transformed by 9/11, deserve to know why it happened and what exactly happened on that day. None of this would have been possible without the support of our members, subscribers to TCN. For them, we are grateful.
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