Bombshell filing: 9/11 hijackers were CIA recruits – The Grayzone

A newly-released court filing raises grave questions about the relationship between Alec Station, a CIA unit set up to track Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden and his associates, and two 9/11 hijackers leading up to the attacks, which was subject to a coverup at the highest levels of the FBI. Obtained by SpyTalk, the filing is a 21-page declaration by Don Canestraro, a lead investigator for the Office of Military Commissions, the legal body overseeing the cases of 9/11 defendants.

It summarizes classified government discovery disclosures, and private interviews he conducted with anonymous high-ranking CIA and FBI officials.

In 1996, Alec Station was created under the watch of the CIA. The initiative was supposed to comprise a joint investigative effort with the FBI. However, FBI operatives assigned to the unit soon found they were prohibited from passing any information to the Bureau's head office without the CIA's authorization, and faced harsh penalties for doing so.

These guys clearly are badwe've got to tell the FBI.' And then [the CIA] said to me, 'no, it's not the FBI's case, not the FBI's jurisdiction'," Mark Rossini, one of the FBI agents in question, has alleged.

While the FBI was in favor of infiltrating Al Qaeda's base, his CIA handler nixed the idea, saying, "There was no way the US would approve an American operative going undercover into Bin Laden's camps.”

In June 2001, CIA and FBI analysts from Alec Station met with senior Bureau officials, including representatives of its own Al Qaeda unit.

Another of Canestraro's sources, a former FBI agent who went by "CS-23," testified that after 9/11, FBI headquarters and its San Diego field office quickly learned of "Bayoumi's affiliation with Saudi intelligence and subsequently the existence of the CIA's operation to recruit" Hazmi and Mihdhar.

The FBI's eager complicity in Alec Station's coverup may have been motivated by self-interest, as one of its own was intimately involved in the unit's effort to recruit Hazmi and Mihdhar, and conceal their presence in the US from relevant authorities.

On August 23rd, they stumbled upon an "Electronic communication" from FBI headquarters, which identified Hazmi and Mihdhar, and noted they were in the US. "CS-12" then contacted the FBI analyst within Alec Station who authored the communication.

"CS-12" soon contacted Corsi "Regarding information on the hijackers." She responded by providing a photograph from the same surveillance operation that produced the three pictures presented at the June 2001 meeting between Alec Station and FBI agents; they depicted Walid bin Attash, a lead suspect in Al Qaeda's 1998 East Africa US Embassy bombings and its attack on the USS Cole.

If it had been, "CS-12" claims they would have "Immediately linked" Hazmi and Mihdhar to bin Attash, which "Would have shifted from an intelligence based investigation into a criminal investigation." The FBI's New York field office could have then devoted its "Full resources" to finding the hijackers before the fateful day of September 11, 2001.

Several FBI sources consulted by Canestraro speculated that the CIA's desperation to penetrate Al Qaeda prompted it to grant Alec Station the power to recruit assets, and pressured it to do so.