Khalid al-Mihdhar

Bin Laden also picks the first operatives.

Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi are Saudis who already hold American visas.

Khalid and Abu Bara are Yemenis, and Yemenis have a harder time getting visas.

Khalid is turned down.

He refuses a second request because of Hanjour’s poor flying.

Two of the original operatives reached the United States months before the pilots.

Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar land in Los Angeles on January 15th, 2000.

Days earlier, they had been at an Al-Qaeda gathering in Kuala Lumpur that American intelligence was watching.

Good morning.

Um, the first two hijackers who came to the United States, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, um, got on Flight 77 in Dulles Airport and left behind an old Toyota Corolla sedan in the parking lot.

That led the FBI almost immediately to San Diego, where they had settled in February of 2000, uh, more than a year before the attacks.

And they were really interesting from the beginning because they, unlike some of the other European educated hijackers, they really were fish out of water in sunny Southern California, where they came in, in January of 2000 from, uh, Malaysia and, and Thailand.

But the point is, is that the, in this court filing, uh, it's, it's a, a summary of evidence given by, uh, senior, under oath, by senior, uh, FBI and CIA officials, you know, anonymously, uh, to the legal teams of, of the various people, um, on, on, on trial for 9/11.

And also evidence provided under discovery, um, uh, w- you know, when the, the, uh, the, the, the US government has provided, you know, some, um, e-evidence exclusively to, um, uh, the, the, uh, the Office of Military Commissions, which demonstrates that, uh, at least two of the hijackers, uh, Hazmi and Mihdhar, uh, were, uh, s- being run by the CIA, CIA as agents, um, uh, pretty much immediately upon their arrival, uh, in the US, using, uh, the Sa- uh, the Saudis as, uh, a proxy.

Um, uh, they, they have a existing l-liaison relationship with the Saudis.

Uh, as the CIA is banned from conducting, or theoretically banned from conducting domestic operations, uh, this was all outsourced to the Saudis, who of course would have to take the wrap f-for it, um, as we're kind of now seeing.

But I mean, ju- ju- ju- the, the, the, the, the, the kind of the mo- the, the furthest that the mainstream has gone, um, on, on, on this is that, um, it could have been potentially prevented, but, uh, people stood, stood back, uh, you know, uh, uh, uh, uh, and allowed this Al-Qaeda, ultimately an Al-Qaeda operation, to happen due to a mixture of, of, you know, incompetence and, um, uh, you know, sh- uh, kind of shady d- pe- uh, shady dealings by different, you know, individuals within the power structure and, and, and, and government agencies.

That, yeah, that, that it could have been averted one way or another, but, uh, it was allowed to happen, um, uh, by people who were in a position to prevent it.

And there's all sorts of, within that, there are all sorts of, of data points like the fact that Hazmi and Mihdhar, um, uh, were kn- were known, um, Al-Qaeda, um, uh, terrorists.

Um, they were on CIA and NSA watch lists.

That this was a plot where there, w- we may not have fully understood what Al-Qaeda was plotting toward But we certainly knew that there was a plot underway.

Uh, you know, the CIA knew that Al- known Al-Qaeda operatives, uh, Nawaf al-Hazmi, Khalid al-Mihdhar were in Los Angeles in the United States in the summer of 2001, information that for various reasons, some of which I believe we still don't know to this day, never made it to the FBI, and that there was a failure to, uh, uh, in the terminology that came up after 9/11, to connect the dots in the lead up.

Um, but remember, uh, uh, Osama bin Laden was very forthright about the plot-

Mm

Like, we have state intelligent operations, [chuckles] names and everything, who were doing illegal work in the towers and got busted.

We have CIA coverup, um, for two of the men on Flight 77 that hit the Pentagon, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid Almihdhar.

We know that they followed them to a KSM Al-Qaeda summit even in Malaysia and didn't share it, information with the FBI.

Like, it's just endless amounts of, uh, uh, of just lies.