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On the line, I got Brian McGlinchey from 28pages.org, and yeah, he did the work to get those 28 pages declassified back a couple of years ago.
And he stayed on the case.
He's been doing great work ever since then.
And you guys might remember Ken Williams, the author of the famous Phoenix Memo, where he said, man, I got suspicious Arabs in flight schools here, boss.
I think maybe we should look into this.
And then the bosses didn't, and then 9-11 happened anyway.
And now he has reported, he's told Brian that he was ordered to not help 9-11 victims build their civil lawsuit case against Saudi Arabia.
Welcome to the show, Brian.
How are you doing, man?
Great to be back with you, Scott.
Very happy to have you here.
Great piece of work, as always.
Great original reporting.
We ran this also at the Libertarian Institute and antiwar.com, of course.
So tell us all about Ken Williams, first of all.
Ken Williams is a retired FBI agent.
He spent his career in Phoenix, Arizona, and in counterterrorism about 27 or 30 years, I think, in that career.
And as you said, he's most famous for writing what is called the Phoenix Memo.
And this is in July of 2001.
He'd been studying local extremists in Arizona, not just Phoenix, which actually turns out to have been a major hotbed of Salafist extremist activity, of al-Qaeda, traffic back and forth.
And he'd been studying these guys and following them and noticed that a lot of them were attending Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.
And he wrote a detailed memo to FBI headquarters in July of 2001 where he says, it's a quote here, Phoenix has observed an inordinate number of individuals of investigative interest who are attending or have attended civil aviation universities and colleges in the state of Arizona.
And he specifically says this is the possibility of a coordinated effort by Osama bin Laden to send students to the United States to attend civil aviation schools and that these could pose a threat to civil aviation targets.
And now the men that he was describing, are they the men that we know now actually ended up piloting those planes into the targets in September?
No, but they are their close associates.
So you have to wonder what they were ever going to do possibly in the future.
And you have people who headed back to Saudi Arabia and other countries.
But in any case, if they'd been investigated, it could have very well led right to the San Diego cell, right?
Yeah, or other cells.
Yes, exactly.
Because some of these people were driving around with 9-11 pilots and other people.
So these were closely associated.
And this memo didn't just say, hey, here's what I think.
It went out and said, here's a recommendation.
I think across the country, the FBI should make a list of all aviation schools, establish liaisons and kind of start looking to see if there's been a suspicious activity, which had they had they really carried that out, you really think they had an excellent chance of wrapping pulling that veil down on this on this plot.
Another major missed opportunity of which there were many.
Yeah, because of the way the suspicious activity people were doing at those schools.
And the stories now about not wanting to not having particular interest in learning how to take off and just the social behavior that some of these people are exhibiting.
And, you know, I think I remember in it was probably congressional testimony where one of these FBI agents or spokesmen or supervisors or something said, well, what were we supposed to do?
Just call every flight school in America and ask them about suspicious Arabs.
And the answer is, of course, yes, that's exactly what you were supposed to do.
And what are we paying these idiots for anyway?
To them, that was like that was asking the impossible.
That was crazy.
What were we supposed to do?
Call them all and say, do you have any suicidal, suspicious Arabs who aren't too interested in how to land because they obviously just want to crash into something?
In which case they would have gotten some positives, probably.
Yeah, I mean, it would have been a big task because there's like three thousand flight schools.
But yeah, I mean, yes, you do pursue that.
I mean, this was a very pointed, detailed memo laying out a case here.
Hey, everybody, this is an emergency.
Cancel all your marijuana investigations.
We've got some flight schools to call.
And that was a libertarian sidetrack in my interview with Ken Williams.
It's not in the piece because it's a little bit off topic.
But he was stressing the point that, hey, you have to understand before 9-11, all the focus of the FBI was on the war on drugs.
You think about the human toll of the war on drugs.
We always think about it in terms of, you know, all the unintended consequences of the war on drugs as it leads to fatalities, be it gang violence, police on civilian violence, drugs that are of unknown dosage that cause overdoses.
But here's a whole different avenue.
You might think about the fact that this investigative resources were focused on the war on drugs when you had this murderous plot that is now, when you count what's going on, what has transpired in the Middle East since then.
I mean, the death toll of this is, what, a million people?
At least.
Anyway, I'm sorry.
So go ahead with the story here.
Yeah, so he had, this is the guy who had sent that famous memo.
He's retired.
And then in October of last year, attorneys for the 9-11 plaintiffs contacted him.
Now, that suit is a civil suit, again, where the victims of 9-11, including 9-11 family members, survivors, there were a lot of people injured, and the insurers of the buildings and a lot of other property, where those people are suing the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the government, for its alleged support given by its government officials, by royal family members to the attack.
So this case has been underway for more than a decade now, going through different hurdles.
And now it's entered the discovery phase.
And the 9-11 attorneys have been building kind of their own investigative case, traveling to Europe, interviewing people.
And so they contacted the 9-11, I'm sorry, they contacted Ken Williams, and looking for help from him, and not revealing classified information, but just information that he could help kind of put the picture together on some things.
He notifies his, just kind of out of habit, he's retired, but kind of out of habit of letting headquarters know about things.
He notified the local FBI counsel, and she said, hmm, she had some reservations.
And a few days later he gets a call from the FBI's office of the general counsel, and they say, you know, we do not want you to, you should not talk to them.
And he said, you know, they gave two reasons that, first, that it could impact other pending litigation involving the United States government, and this attorney did not specify what that meant.
And because the Trump administration was trying to develop good relations with the Saudi government, he said, so you've got a 9-11, I shared this with a 9-11 widow, actually she helped me facilitate this story, Cathy Owens, she had a great quote.
She said, how in the world did we, the 9-11 families, become the enemy of the FBI?
You know, you put yourself in her shoes, and you've got the FBI saying, you know, the White House wants good relations with Saudi Arabia, so Saudi Arabia said, let's not rock the boat by bringing any, helping these 9-11 victims look for facts about the mass murder of their loved ones.
Well, and this came up in, you had a tweet storm last week, criticizing this, you know, PR stunt that they put in The Guardian, right, where they interviewed Osama bin Laden's mom, and they were saying, kind of as what you regarded in your tweets there, as the straw man argument that, well, there were 15 Saudi hijackers, and you talked about how you've written all of this stuff, and you've never focused on that, because that's unnecessary.
Whoever exactly the hijackers were, I mean, I think it's pretty suspicious how all these guys were sent, the muscle hijackers, they say, right, not the pilots, but the backup, were all sent sort of at the last minute, in the last few months before the attack, so I would like to know a lot more about how they got to the U.S., and who in Saudi sent them, but you were saying that, listen, nobody's case against Saudi Arabia here is dependent on the identity of the hijackers in that sense, in their nationality.
This is all about who paid who, and who coordinated with who, and who had whose phone number in whose pocket, etc., like this.
Yeah, this is about Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, sending money to an extremist named Osama Bastan in Southern California, who reportedly boasted of the help he gave to these 9-11 hijackers, and has close association with other people who are believed to have been operating for the Saudi government in coordination with the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles.
It's about the fact that they found phone numbers that have links to the phone number of an unlisted entity owned by Prince Bandar in Abu Zubaydah's phone book that they found in Pakistan.
It's about a whole lot more than that.
And so, yeah, in that tweetstorm, people can check that out, the thread I did at 28pages, that's where I am on Twitter, I said, yeah, I've written, I think, 148 articles about this topic, and I've never mentioned, hey, 15 of the 19 were Saudi citizens, because that's the least of the case.
A lot of people think that's the core of it.
They could have been funding and facilitating 19 Spanish people, or pick a country, it doesn't matter.
It's all this other actions of facilitating this that that case is focused on.
All right, so tell us more about that then, and more about Ken Williams, because it sounds here like you educated him on some things, and he was pretty upset to find out some of these details.
Yeah, kind of going over some things.
He had been involved in the investigation of some interesting figures in this, and I wanted to just use this interview opportunity to ask for a little bit of his insights or perspective on some of these things.
One of those things is that one of the people who he was very much focused on in Arizona was named Ghassan al-Sharbi.
He was a Saudi citizen.
He was in Arizona.
Then he ends up being apprehended by coalition forces in Pakistan with Abu Zubaydah, who is originally thought to be a high-level al-Qaeda guy.
It turns out he was more like a logistics guy, but still, he was very much in the thick of things over there.
So he's apprehended with him, and a couple of years ago, I reported on this quietly declassified 9-11 commission document, and it revealed for the first time that when they captured al-Sharbi, they found his U.S. flight certificate in an envelope of the Saudi embassy in Washington.
That was the first we'd ever heard of it, and so there was no reporting on what was the significance of that envelope.
It may not have—envelopes get reused.
Who knows why he had that envelope?
It could have been related to his trip to the United States.
Who knows what that was?
But anyway, it's still a question that is out there.
So here was my chance to ask an FBI agent kind of, oh, what ever did become of that?
And yeah, when I threw that question to him, he says, oh, see now, here you go.
You're talking about my al-Sharbi, right?
I did not know that, and I was—my eyes were kind of fluttering as I interviewed him.
I was surprised to hear that this FBI agent who knew so much about al-Sharbi and had investigated him had not been colluded on that case.
As he told me, he says, I knew that guy better than anybody in the U.S. government.
I should have been included because obviously with all these investigation things, this kind of goes to the fact that 9-11 was able to be pulled off in great part because of the failure of—to share information amongst government agencies and here even within a government agency.
And here you see the same thing proceeding into the investigation of 9-11 after it happened.
And then, too, he didn't know what I was relating a little bit earlier, that when they found Abu Zubaydah's phone book, it had a number linked to Prince Bandar's— a number linked to the number of Prince Bandar's mansion in Colorado.
And he kind of went off the handle again.
He said, for crying out loud, one of my guys was arrested with this guy.
So here's another one.
Anyway, he said, were there any Arizona numbers in that book?
That's the kind of question he would want to know.
So he clearly does not think the 9-11 investigation was— he gives it far less than an A-plus grade in terms of information sharing.
He does empathize a little with the fact of what—how colossal that investigation was.
But as another example, there was an incident in 1999 where two people, two Saudis, were flying from Arizona—and they were people of interest to him, I believe— and flying from Arizona to Washington, D.C. for an event at the Saudi embassy.
And these guys reportedly were asking a lot of odd questions on the plane.
And then one of them allegedly twice attempted to open the cockpit door.
And people look at that and say, oh, this might have been a dry run to gather information and see what it's like when you get up there and try to open that door and so forth.
And one of these guys would end up being in Afghanistan at the camps at the same time the muscle hijackers were over there training.
And so 9-11 happens.
These two guys are in Saudi Arabia now who were on this dry run because it was investigated, but then there was a big flap over, hey, this is racial profiling.
And so it ended up being kind of set to the side.
Post-9-11, the FBI goes over to interview these two, and they don't— Ken Williams, who had built a whole extensive file on them, they didn't even consult him.
He thought he should have participated in the interview and volunteered to repeatedly.
He never heard back from them.
And obviously somebody who's followed these guys real closely and has a whole file on them, I think you might want to tap their brain and get some coaching on what questions to ask.
Right.
All right, so other than what he was excluded from, what did you learn from Ken Williams here that you didn't already know?
Well, I guess the biggest thing was this kind of headline that you've got the FBI now, in 2017-18, saying that you shouldn't help pull together the facts about this stuff because the White House wants to have a good relationship with Saudi Arabia.
I mean, this prioritization of this U.S.-Saudi relationship over 9-11 families, over facts.
One thing, they said, oh, we're concerned about sharing classified information.
I mean, the lawyers are absolutely not asking him that kind of thing.
But to come right out and explicitly say we don't want you to do this because of the White House's foreign policy objectives, is a terrible thing.
In the article, I interviewed former Senate Intelligence Chair Bob Graham, and he said he called it a fundamental assault on the principle of democracy.
He's been on this all this time in terms of trying to push for the release of more material about the case, which continues to be a major theme, is this quest for declassification.
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Thanks.
So talk to me about this Sarasota House for a minute, because this was part of the story that was excluded.
The FBI didn't tell the congressional investigators in the Joint House-Senate investigation, which is where the 28 pages come from.
But even in the 28 pages, it's not in there.
I remember Bob Graham, when he found out about it, was angry as hell that he hadn't been told about this when he was the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time.
And of course, that has nothing to do, it was nowhere reported in the 9-11 Commission report either.
Right.
Totally off the radar.
Yeah, this situation here, there was a wealthy Saudi family living in a nice gated community in Sarasota, Florida.
And less than two weeks before 9-11, they suddenly left and went back to the United States.
Excuse me, went back to Saudi Arabia.
When I say suddenly, I mean they left new cars in the driveway.
There was food in the refrigerator.
Like the computer was gone, but the cord still going into the wall.
I mean, by all indications, just an absolute urgent, we've got to get out of here now type of thing.
And this has been investigated by Dan Christensen at Florida Bulldog.
And that's a site the audience might want to check out to FloridaBulldog.org, where he's reported on this extensively at the center of this quest for releasing of information about it now.
So as you say, this was drawn to his attention in 2011.
He investigated.
He checks in with Bob Graham, Senator Graham, to see what he knows about it.
He's shocked, kind of like I was in that earlier anecdote with Ken Williams.
He was shocked to find Bob Graham's hearing about it for the first time.
Especially when you consider the fact that not only was he chairman of this inquiry, but he's also at the time the senator from Florida.
So this is his state.
It definitely would have stuck with him, this situation.
And now in trying to get information about this from the FBI through the Freedom of Information Act, it has been a total saga and one that illustrates the FBI's continuing effort to keep a blanket on anything related to Saudi investigations.
As Dan Christensen investigated this, he had a source said that this house was linked to 9-11 hijackers because of gate records kept by the security gate and phone records linked this house to Mohammed Adda and others.
And a number of them were taking flight lessons nearby in Hollywood, Florida, in that vicinity.
And so Dan Christensen then, to get more information on this, pursues the Freedom of Information Act.
He's initially told, oh, there was nothing to that.
And then he's asked for some documents.
You know, what documents do you have?
We don't have anything.
I mean, if you investigate a cat in a tree, you're going to have some record of it.
Here, the FBI is saying they didn't have any information on it.
Back and forth.
Finally, then all of a sudden he gets a memo that they shared with him from the original investigation where the guy says we found many links between the house and 9-11 hijackers, which contradicts the FBI's position on it.
Not to drag out too long, but the case keeps going where they say, well, we don't have any other investigative material on this, which strains credulity as well.
Then they go to the FOIA lawsuit route.
And now the FBI says, well, we've got 80,000 pages of material.
Not necessarily all that about this family, but about their case files.
A judge has been going through that in camera, meaning in his facilities, you know, in chambers for years to see what of that should be coming out.
And then the kind of the cover up this has continued with what was called the 9-11 Review Commission.
That was in 2013 and 15.
It's not the 9-11 Commission.
But this was a kind of a follow up that was pre-planned and pre-scheduled to kind of follow back up on the 9-11 Commission.
It was supposed to be this big kind of like 9-11 Commission 2, where it was big and independent and all that kind of stuff.
Well, it ends up being an operation where it's like, OK, FBI, you just handle this commission.
So they were in charge of the commission.
They chose and paid the salaries of the three commissioners of it and managed it.
They used this commission as a vehicle to try to put an end to this whole Sarasota question.
And you have an FBI agent in this commission saying, oh, that original report about many connections was a bad statement and there's no basis for it.
But now Dan Christensen in Florida, Bulldog, his attorneys are now pressing the government and are in full blown lawsuit mode with the government to say, what on what basis did you determine it was a bad statement and trying to get more background on it?
But it just goes back in and shows that we've got the secrecy surrounding investigation of Saudi links to 9-11.
And if this was in this was in Florida, OK, well, 9-11, there were 9-11 cells activity, Al Qaeda activity going on all around this country.
So if you've got this Florida office doing this kind of thing, you can imagine that in Virginia, in California, in North Jersey, you've got many, many more files about the activities of those people that is still being concealed.
Yeah, well, so what do you make of all this?
You know, I know you're not done reporting the story and it's not all tied up yet.
But, you know, you talk about in your in your tweet thread last week there about, you know, protection money that the Saudi royal family had been paying to these Al Qaeda guys in the 1990s.
Go blow up somebody, but just not us.
That kind of thing.
And I remember talking with Greg Palast about this back way back in 2003 or something about a lot of this going on.
But so, you know, when you have Prince Bandar and all these guys involved, you know, at least raises questions.
A lot of people kind of already are suspicious about who all was involved in this.
Does this represent a Saudi covert op, an attack on the United States by the government of Saudi Arabia, do you think?
Yeah, I think it's more of a slightly different dynamic.
It's not so much that the Saudis said, let's attack the United States.
You know, to the contrary, it's it was their their priority.
There is the Saudi royal family's support of Al Qaeda is war out of their own self preservation.
Kind of, as you said, you can raise hell abroad, but not here.
The.
This is a devil's bargain, if you will, where if if if we don't let these people vent abroad, they're going to cause trouble at home.
So is that kind of an understanding and that kind of an agreement?
And so it was time turning a blind eye to what may be the consequences of that.
And to put a finer point on it, really, it's a means of them to kind of establish their legitimacy, because you have to understand that Wahhabism, Salafism, the variant of Islam that is at the core of this ideology that is behind ISIS, Al Qaeda.
It's an ideology that says you should have you live very simply, you know, that you should be focused on your relationship with God.
You should live very simply.
You contrast that to the.
Lifestyles of the Saudi princes, you know, living in wealth, gold plated bathroom fixtures, you know, cavorting with prostitutes in Europe, you know, and on and on.
So you can see where that would cause some tension at home with the with the people who follow this ideology.
And so this is a means of them establishing, oh, hey, we're legitimate because, look, we're supporting the jihad abroad.
So it's kind of that that kind of a dynamic.
And it does make sense, too, that as they used to put it at the Pentagon, the joint staff, it was a figure of speech.
It was a cliche saying in the 1990s that, hey, terrorism is a small price to pay to be a world superpower.
And so, in other words, a truck bomb goes off here.
There we lose 19 airmen at Cobar Towers.
We lose six people at the World Trade Center.
You know, these kind of things.
And so what's that compared to rule in the world?
Not that big of a deal.
And I guess it was you could see the failure of imagination there.
What if that 1993 attack had been successful and knocking one tower over into the other?
You might have had 50000 people killed at midday.
Right.
Right.
I mean, a lot of this this whole dynamic of why the Saudis would support terrorism, you know, with financial funding and other facilitation.
You kind of trace it back to 1979 when the mosque at Mecca was taken over by these religious extremists.
This was a shock to the system of the Saudi royal family.
And at that point they said, well, you know, there's a whole pivot to where they had to feel like they were demonstrating their their.
Their devotion to Wahhabism by supporting Jihad, which conveniently happened in 1979, such a pivotal year.
Then they had an outlet for that in concert with the United States in supporting Jihad in Afghanistan.
Right.
Yeah.
There's a quote I have in my book from Andrew Coburn talking about palling around with some Egyptian intelligence officers who said, yeah, what a smart idea to funnel all of our, you know, extreme young men off to go fight in Afghanistan.
But the problem is the ones that survived came home.
And now what do we do with them?
The rest is history, I guess.
Exactly.
And, you know, this was the Afghanistan operation.
It established the whole connections across the globe, too, because you had people there convening from North Africa, Saudi Arabia, from the Philippines.
You had people networking and just absolutely laid the groundwork for that.
That's why 20pages.org had the when Zbigniew Brzezinski died and everybody else in journalism and the media was fawning over him and throwing their laurels.
You know, my headline was Zbigniew Brzezinski, godfather of al-Qaeda and Taliban dead at 89.
Because, you know, in a very real sense, that's the case.
Absolutely.
All right.
Well, listen, man, I'm sorry I'm late.
I got to run here, but I really appreciate your time on the show again, Brian.
Hey, great to be with you.
And I just encourage your audience to pick up the phone and call your senator and ask them to support Senate Resolution 597.
It's a new resolution just introduced to press for the release of these 9-11 documents.
The classification is not about national security.
It's about protecting very uncomfortable truths about our alleged ally, Saudi Arabia.
So ask them to co-sponsor Senate Resolution 597 because the 9-11 families need these documents to make the case.
And that that courtroom is our best opportunity to pry more secrets and get to the bottom of it.
Let me ask you this, man.
I mean, Cornyn and Cruz are less than worthless.
So but are there any senators who you think might be softer targets who could possibly be swayed on this?
Cornyn is actually a soft target, and I believe he might be one of the first ones to sign on to John Cornyn.
Oh, really?
Yeah, you know, the biggest hurdle the 9-11 families had to get over with pursuing this case was some technicalities about the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.
And he was one of the lead guys on JASTA, the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, which cleared the way for this suit to proceed.
So, yeah, you know, it's funny.
I am shocked to hear that.
Not just surprised, but OK.
So I would expect him to be possibly one of the first guys to co-sponsor.
It was introduced last week.
That's great to hear.
Yeah, but so if he can do it, then pick up your phone because a lot of other people, it's just the right thing to do.
And as this FBI agent has said, this is there is no reason 17 years later, this is a counterintelligence agent.
And I've interviewed other people who talk like this.
He said 17 years is a lifetime in intelligence.
He says there is no way that these things, this still hidden information, by releasing it would pose any threat to national security.
And what's that Senate resolution number again?
Senate Resolution 597.
597.
All right.
Thank you again, Brian.
Really appreciate it.
Great to be with you, Scott.
All right, you guys, that is Brian McGlinchey, 28pages.org for his latest.
FBI told former agent not to help 9-11 victims build a case against Saudi Arabia.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
