U.S. Counterterrorism Officials Insisted that Crotch Bomber Be Let Into Country

The State Department didn't revoke the visa of foiled terrorism suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab because federal counterterrorism officials had begged off revocation, a top State Department official revealed Wednesday.

Patrick F. Kennedy, an undersecretary for management at the State Department, said Abdulmutallab's visa wasn't taken away because intelligence officials asked his agency not to deny a visa to the suspected terrorist over concerns that a denial would've foiled a larger investigation into al-Qaida threats against the United States.

"Revocation action would've disclosed what they were doing," Kennedy said in testimony before the House Committee on Homeland Security. Allowing Adbulmutallab to keep the visa increased chances federal investigators would be able to get closer to apprehending the terror network he is accused of working with, "rather than simply knocking out one solider in that effort."

This is eerily similar to 9/11:

• One of al-Qaeda's top trainers in terrorism and how to hijack airplanes, who was a very close associate of Bin Laden, was an American citizen who was an operative for the FBI, the CIA, and the Army (see this article from the San Francisco Chronicle and this article from the Globe and Mail). Indeed, while he was acting as an FBI informant, he smuggled Bin Laden in and out of Afghanistan, helped plan the attacks on US embassies in Africa, and apparently played a pivotal role in planning 9/11.

According to a 1995 Boston Globe report, his entry into the country was made possible by "clandestine CIA sponsorship." According to West Point's Combatting Terrorism Center, the terrorist was:

Given a visa waiver under a "little known visa waiver program that allows the CIA and other security agencies to bring valuable agents into the country, bypassing the usual immigration formalities." While perhaps "little known," this authority was granted to the Director of National Intelligence by the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949 and codified in 50 U.S.C. 403h, which states that if "the admission of a particular alien into the United States for permanent residence is in the interest of national security or essential to the furtherance of the national intelligence mission, such alien and his immediate family shall be admitted to the United States for permanent residence without regard to their inadmissibility under the immigration or any other laws and regulations"."

• 11 of the hijackers received visas to the U.S. through a consular office where, according to the former head of that office, the CIA routinely insisted that visas be granted to terrorists, even when their visa applications should have been rejected under standard operating procedure

Indeed:

• An Al Qaeda operative very close to one of the top Al Qaeda leaders was a CIA informant

• In an article on the nephew of the supposed key mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Newsday reported in 1995: "FBI officials also are considering a probe of whether the CIA had any relationship with [the nephew], who fought with the CIA-financed mujaheddin in Afghanistan in the 1980s." A classified FBI file also reportedly indicated that the nephew had been recruited by the local branch of the CIA (pages 220-221)

• The president of Pakistan said that one of the masterminds of 9/11 was an MI6 (British intelligence services) agent

And U.S. and allied intelligence services had penetrated the highest levels of Al Qaeda prior to 9/11. For example:

• In January 2001 -- the French intelligence services gave a report to the CIA entitled "Plan to hijack an aircraft by Islamic radicals". Indeed, "foreign agents had infiltrated Osama bin Laden's network and were carefully tracking its moves" prior to 9/11. The original story from the leading French newspaper makes it clear that such infiltration went to the highest levels of Al-Qaeda's camps, and included listening to the hijackers' debates about which airlines' planes should be hijacked, and that allied intelligence services also listened into satellite phone conversations between the hijackers

• Moroccan intelligence penetrated Bin Laden's inner circle, and reported on Bin Laden's plans to the U.S.

• A longtime CIA officer says, "Egyptians, Jordanians, [and] Palestinians penetrated the bin Laden organization for us. It's B.S. that we didn't." (page 143)

• Former CIA director George Tenet says that "a group of assets from a Middle Eastern service", working for the CIA, penetrated al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan by September 2001. Bin Laden was dropping hints about the upcoming 9/11 attacks to training camp trainees in the summer of 2001, and US citizen John Walker Lindh was told details of the 9/11 attacks within weeks of joining a training camp that summer

• USA Today states: "U.S. intelligence overheard al-Qaeda operatives discussing a major pending terrorist attack in the weeks prior to Sept. 11 and had agents inside the terror group"

• Indeed, in the summer of 2001, the CIA allegedly told President Bush that the highest levels of Al-Qaeda had been penetrated

• The Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11 discovered that an FBI informant had hosted and rented a room to two hijackers in 2000 and that, when the Inquiry sought to interview the informant, the FBI refused outright, and then hid him in an unknown location, and that a high-level FBI official stated these blocking maneuvers were undertaken under orders from the White House (confirmed here by the Co-Chair of the Joint Inquiry and former Head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bob Graham)

• The Pentagon also tracked the hijackers before 9/11

• Israel tracked the hijackers' every movement prior to the attacks, and may have sent agents to film the attack on the World Trade Centers. Israel, a very close ally of the U.S., presumably shared intelligence prior to 9/11
  

• And Saudi intelligence was "actively following" most of the September 11, 2001, plotters "with precision" prior to the attacks. Saudi Arabia, like Israel, is a very close ally of the U.S.

• The CIA and the NSA had been intercepting phone calls by the hijackers for years

• The National Security Agency and the FBI were both independently listening in on the phone calls between the supposed mastermind of the attacks and the lead hijacker. Indeed, the FBI built its own antenna in Madagascar specifically to listen in on the mastermind's phone calls. The day before 9/11, the mastermind told the lead hijacker "tomorrow is zero hour" and gave final approval for the attacks. The NSA intercepted the message that day and the FBI was likely also monitoring the mastermind's phone calls. (The NSA claims that it did not translate the intercept until September 12th; however, the above-mentioned FBI translator said that she was frequently ordered to falsify dates of translations regarding 9/11)

• Shortly before 9/11, the NSA also intercepted multiple phone calls from Bin Laden's chief of operations to the United States

• Only two days before 9/11, Osama Bin Laden called his stepmother and told her "In two days, you're going to hear big news and you're not going to hear from me for a while." US officials later told CNN that "in recent years they've been able to monitor some of bin Laden's telephone communications with his [step]mother. Bin Laden at the time was using a satellite telephone, and the signals were intercepted and sometimes recorded." Indeed, before 9/11, to impress important visitors, NSA analysts would occasionally play audio tapes of bin Laden talking to his stepmother

• According to intelligence officials in India, Pakistan's military chief of intelligence wired $100,000 to the lead hijacker days before 9/11 (mentioned here in a news roundup). This is especially interesting because: That particular chief of intelligence was appointed to that position with the approval of the U.S., and the intelligence chief had held "consultations" with his U.S. counterparts at the CIA and the Pentagon during the week prior to September 11. Coincidentally, the above-described military chief of intelligence who wired the $100,000 to the hijacker actually met with the leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees on the very morning of 9/11
  

• 9/11 family member and "Jersey Girl" Patty Casazza was told by whistleblowers that -- before 9/11 -- the government knew the exact day, the type of attack, and the targets

• One of France's largest newspapers claims that the CIA met with Bin Laden in an American hospital in Dubai in July 2001