What Really Happened on 9/11?

September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda carried out four coordinated suicide terrorist attacks against the United States, killing 2,750 civilians in New York City, 184 at the Pentagon and 40 airline passengers whose plane crashed in Pennsylvania.¹ At least, that’s what we’ve been told. But is that really what happened?

The video above is a five-minute rapid-fire summary by investigative journalist James Corbett of the official narrative and the main problems with the “terrorist attack” narrative.

In 2016, Corbett published a “9/11 Suspects” video series in which he dissected the alleged attacks and reviewed potential suspects. Four years later, he re-released the series as an hour-long documentary,² embedded below for your convenience. As noted by Corbett in the documentary:³

“9/11 was a crime. This should not be a controversial statement, but given how 9/11 was framed as a terrorist attack or even an ‘act of war’ from the very moment that it occurred, it somehow is. If we lived in a world of truth and justice, 9/11 would have been approached as a crime to be solved rather than an attack to be responded to …

Like a prosecutor trying to bring down a mafia kingpin, it is unlikely that such an investigation would start by bringing the suspected mastermind of the plot to trial.

Such a vast and intricate operation would be picked apart from the outside, starting with people on the periphery of the plot who could be forced to testify under oath and who could provide leads further up the ladder.

As more and more of the picture was filled in, the case against the inner clique who ran the operation would begin to strengthen, and, gradually, more and more central figures could be brought to trial.

We may not live in a world where such a criminal investigation is taking place, but we are trying the crimes of 9/11 in the court of public opinion …

Over the course of The Corbett Report’s existence, I have looked at many figures who no doubt feature more prominently in the 9/11 plot itself from an operational standpoint: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Larry Silverstein, Dov Zakheim, Paul Bremer, Richard Armitage.

[In the documentary] we will look at some of the other suspects in that crime; not ringleaders or masterminds, not even people who were likely to know about the plot ahead of time. But those who helped cover up those crimes for the real perpetrators.”

Characters featured in Corbett’s film are former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman, executive director of the 9/11 commission Philip Zelikow, former CIA case officer Robert Baer and general Ralph Eberhart.

Was Saudi Arabia Involved?

As noted by Corbett, it took President Bush 441 days to establish a commission to investigate the events of 9/11, and even then he didn’t do it willingly. Bush reportedly resisted the idea of conducting an investigation, and even asked Senate majority leader Tom Daschle to limit Congressional inquiries.

Commission chairman Thomas Kean also later stated the commission members felt they’d been “set up to fail,” as the investigation was underfunded and rushed. Curiously, Zelikow, the executive director of the commission, had also authored the Bush administration’s 2002 national security strategy, which included the use of a “preemptive war” strategy against Iraq, which would seem a rather severe conflict of interest.

The 9/11 Commission Report⁴ was published July 22, 2004, but to this day, 28 pages of the report detailing the role of Saudi Arabia remain classified. In April 2016, the editorial board of the New York Post called on then-President Barack Obama to declassify the sealed pages, stating “America deserves the truth about the Saudis and 9/11.” According to the New York Post:⁵

“As early as 2003, a U.S. official who’d read the pages told the Los Angeles Times they linked ‘direct involvement of senior Saudi government officials in a coordinated and methodical way directly’ to the terrorists …

Paul Sperry has been writing in The Post about this for over three years, reporting that Riyadh’s involvement ‘was deliberately covered up at the highest levels of our government.’ Federal investigations were quashed and leads ignored …

Riyadh actively funded al Qaeda and other Islamist extremists for decades — officially stopping only after they turned on the Saudi kingdom. How many of the perfidious princes kept it up anyway?

Only the 9/11 commissioners have dared pursue that question. The rest of official Washington shied away, for fear disclosure would threaten the US-Saudi relationship.”

In another 2016 New York Post article, Sperry wrote:⁶

“… the kingdom’s involvement was deliberately covered up at the highest levels of our government. And the coverup goes beyond locking up 28 pages of the Saudi report in a vault in the U.S. Capitol basement. Investigations were throttled. Co-conspirators were let off the hook.

Case agents I’ve interviewed at the Joint Terrorism Task Forces in Washington and San Diego, the forward operating base for some of the Saudi hijackers, as well as detectives at the Fairfax County (Va.) Police Department who also investigated several 9/11 leads, say virtually every road led back to the Saudi Embassy in Washington, as well as the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles.

Yet time and time again, they were called off from pursuing leads. A common excuse was ‘diplomatic immunity.’ Those sources say the pages missing from the 9/11 congressional inquiry report … detail ‘incontrovertible evidence’ gathered from both CIA and FBI case files of official Saudi assistance for at least two of the Saudi hijackers who settled in San Diego …

‘The Saudi ambassador funded two of the 9/11 hijackers through a third party,’ [former FBI agent John] Guandolo said. ‘He should be treated as a terrorist suspect, as should other members of the Saudi elite class who the U.S. government knows are currently funding the global jihad.’”

At Least Two 9/11 Hijackers Were CIA Recruits

Even more disturbing is the declaration⁷ of Donald Canestraro, an investigator with the Office of Military Commissions, the legal body overseeing the cases of 9/11 defendants, who in July 2016 launched an investigation into the possible involvement of both the Saudi Arabian government and the CIA in events leading up to 9/11.

According to Canestraro, at least two of the 9/11 hijackers — Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar — were Saudi nationals who had been recruited into a joint CIA-Saudi intelligence operation. Hazmi and Mihdhar also lived with an FBI informant.

Canestraro’s declaration confirms previous suspicions that the CIA knew far more about the hijackers than they admitted,⁸ and may in fact have been working with them at the time of the attacks. As reported by The Grayzone:⁹

“When originally released in 2021 on the Office’s public court docket, every part of the document was redacted except an ‘unclassified’ marking. Given its explosive contents, it is not difficult to see why: as Canestraro’s investigation concluded, at least two 9/11 hijackers had been recruited either knowingly or unknowingly into a joint CIA-Saudi intelligence operation which may have gone awry.

In 1996, Alec Station [a special CIA unit tasked with tracking the activities of Osama bin Laden] was created … 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 …

In late 1999, with ‘the system blinking red’ about an imminent large-scale Al Qaeda terror attack inside the U.S., the CIA and NSA were closely monitoring an ‘operational cadre’ within an Al Qaeda cell that included the Saudi nationals Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. The pair would purportedly go on to hijack American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11.

January 15th, Hazmi and Mihdhar entered the U.S. through Los Angeles International Airport … Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi government ‘ghost employee’ immediately met them at an airport restaurant. After a brief conversation, Bayoumi helped them find an apartment near his own in San Diego, co-signed their lease, set them up bank accounts, and gifted $1,500 towards their rent …

Bayoumi alleged his run-in with the two would-be hijackers was mere happenstance… The Bureau disagreed, concluding Bayoumi was a Saudi spy, who handled a number of Al Qaeda operatives in the U.S. They also considered there to be a ‘50/50 chance’ he — and by extension Riyadh — had detailed advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks …

A Bureau special agent, dubbed ‘CS-3’ in the document, stated Bayoumi’s contact with the hijackers and support thereafter ‘was done at the behest of the CIA through the Saudi intelligence service.’ Alec Station’s explicit purpose was to ‘recruit Al-Hazmi and Al-Mihdhar via a liaison relationship,’ with the assistance of Riyadh’s General Intelligence Directorate.”

According to high level sources that spoke to Canestraro, it was highly unusual for Alec Station to recruit human assets. The unit consisted of CIA analysts whose job it was to collect intelligence on Osama bin Laden and warn policymakers about his activities. Alec Station was not equipped to handle covert operations.

Moreover, if the CIA had recruited or even was just monitoring Hazmi and Mihdhar in the U.S., they were likely in violation of the CIA’s charter, as they’re not allowed to carry out operations on U.S. soil.

CIA case officers within Alec Station also admitted to other violations, such as directing field officers — over whom they had no legal authority — to carry out tasks for the unit. In the aftermath of 9/11, both Alec Station and the FBI suppressed investigations into the unit’s operation to recruit Hazmi and Mihdhar.

One key takeaway from the Grayzone’s extensive writeup about this affair is that the FBI could have stopped Hazmi and Mihdhar, if only the CIA unit had actually shared information with the FBI, as it was supposed to, as the FBI had already linked the pair to Walid bin Attash, another al-Qaeda terror suspect. As noted by Grayzone:

“Alec Station’s tireless efforts to protect its Al Qaeda assets raises the obvious question of whether Hazmi and Mihdhar, and possibly other hijackers, were in effect working for the CIA on the day of 9/11.

The real motives behind the CIA’s stonewalling may never be known. But it appears abundantly clear that Alec Station did not want the FBI to know about or interfere in its secret intelligence operation.

If the unit’s recruitment of Hazmi and Mihdhar was purely dedicated to information gathering, rather than operational direction, it is incomprehensible that the FBI had not been apprised of it, and was instead actively misdirected.”

A question then arises. Had Alec Station gone rogue? It’s unlikely, considering no Alec Station member has ever been punished for the intelligence failures that allowed 9/11 to occur.

Was It an Inside Job?

As bad as all of that may seem, other evidence¹⁰ points to an even more sinister possibility, and that is that U.S. authorities not only knew about the potential for an attack beforehand, but that they were part of it.

In other words, it may have been a false flag event, orchestrated to justify the implementation of the Patriot Act, which brought with it massively increased surveillance and reduced freedom, and the launch of the war in Afghanistan.

Just how and why did World Trade Center building 7 collapse? No planes struck it, and it wasn’t on fire. Speaking of fire, more than 3,000 architects and engineers have gone on record saying fire, even if fueled by jet fuel, couldn’t possibly cause a skyscraper to collapse into its own footprint, let alone a skyscraper that was undamaged.

According to Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth,¹¹ the evidence clearly points to the three buildings being destroyed by explosives placed at strategic locations within the buildings, which means they had to have been planted well beforehand.

Was it pure coincidence that war games and terror drills were being conducted that very same day, allowing air defenses to be circumvented? Was it also pure coincidence that whatever hit the Pentagon vaporized the budget analyst office and its contents, which was trying to figure out where $2.3 trillion of the Pentagon’s budget had disappeared to?

And what’s the likelihood of finding an undamaged passport on the streets of New York City, identifying one of the hijackers, when the plane and the entire building had been turned to ash?

These and many other questions have been asked by 911truth.org,¹² which today, 22 years later, is still working to get answers. You can delve deeper into these questions on 911 Truth’s Case for Complicity page.¹³ The Journal of 9/11 Studies¹⁴ is another resource. It’s a peer-reviewed electronic-only journal that covers any and all research related to the events of 9/11.