Why Louis Freeh Should Be Investigated For 9/11

One month after the explosion, chemists at the FBI crime laboratory in Washington found traces of PETN, an explosive component of bombs and surface-to-air missiles, in the wreckage.[17]  Despite this, in November 1997, the FBI closed its investigation and announced that “No evidence has been found which would indicate that a criminal act was the cause of the tragedy of TWA flight 800.”[18]

This reversal of findings was led by Freeh and Jamie Gorelick.  After meeting with Freeh and Gorelick, James Kallstrom, the agent in charge of the New York office where the TWA 800 investigation was being handled, produced several unlikely explanations for the detection of the PETN.  Although none of these hypotheses was probable, the FBI was able to convince the media to change the story.[19]

Louis Freeh was leading the FBI during the investigation into the 1993 WTC bombing, at the time of the OKC bombing, and at the time of the crash of TWA Flight 800.  All of these events suggest the facilitation, or cover-up, of terrorist acts by the FBI.  However, these were not the only indications that Louis Freeh was leading an agency that facilitated terrorism.

Ignoring or facilitating “Islamic” terrorism

Before leaving his position in the summer of 2001, Freeh was responsible for overseeing more than a dozen failures related to “Islamic” terrorism and the alleged 9/11 hijackers.  Here are the first nine.

1. Between 1989 and 1998, Ali Mohamed was an FBI informant. He was also a U.S. Army Special Forces sergeant and al Qaeda’s primary trainer.[20]  According to U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, Mohamed “trained most of al Qaeda’s top leadership – including Bin Laden and Zawahiri – and most of al Qaeda’s top trainers. He gave some training to persons who would later carry out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.”[21] Mohamed had been an FBI informant, since at least 1992, and was previously a CIA “contract agent.”  In a move indicative of U.S. oversight, he transitioned directly from the U.S. Special Forces to fighting and training the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.[22]  When he was arrested in 1998, Mohamed was allowed to plea bargain and, to this day, he has never been brought to trial.
2. In early 1995, Freeh was behind the cancelation of a raid on a suspected terrorist-financing organization.  Recent legislation had enabled plans for the raid and prosecution of The Holy Land Foundation in Arlington, Texas.  But Freeh stopped the raid using the dubious excuse that it would alienate Arabs in the United States.[23]  Holy Land was finally raided just after 9/11 and, years later, it was convicted of providing material support to a terrorist organization.[24]
3. In May 1995, FBI agents wrote a memo about what they had learned in their interrogation of Abdul Hakim Murad, a Kuwaiti who allegedly helped bomb the WTC in 1993.  Murad told the FBI about another plan to hijack multiple airliners in Asia and crash them into buildings in the U.S., including the WTC.  Inexplicably, the FBI memo omitted all of the details the agents had learned about this plot, called Operation Bojinka.[25]  In 1996, Murad was convicted of crimes related to Bojinka yet, as author Peter Lance wrote, the FBI seemed to “go out of its way to avoid even a hint of the plot that was ultimately carried out on 9/11.”[26]
4. Gregory Scarpa, Jr. was an organized crime figure who, when imprisoned for an unrelated crime in 1996, was located in a cell between Ramzi Yousef and Abdul Hakim Murad.  Working undercover for the FBI, Scarpa was able to gain significant information about an active al Qaeda cell in New York City, and a “treasure trove of al Qaeda plans.”  After working closely with Scarpa to gain the intelligence, Freeh and his subordinates ended up calling the whole thing a “hoax” and buried the information. [27]
5. On May 15, 1998, an FBI pilot sent his supervisor in the Oklahoma City FBI office a memo, warning that he had observed “large numbers of Middle Eastern males receiving flight training at Oklahoma airports in recent months.”  The memo went on to suggest that these people were planning terrorist activities.  It was sent to the Bureau’s Weapons of Mass Destruction unit but no action was ever taken.[28]
6. In September 1999, FBI agents showed up at Airman Flight School in Norman, OK, to investigate the school’s training of Ihab Ali Nawawi. A suspect in the 1998 embassy bombings who was supposedly the personal pilot of Osama bin Laden, Nawawi had been arrested in Orlando four months before.[29]  He has been in U.S. custody ever since but has never been brought to trial.  Despite the investigation of Nawawi and the 1998 warning from an OKC FBI pilot, the FBI apparently never thought to keep a closer eye on Airman Flight School.  Zacarias Moussaoui and several alleged 9/11 hijackers trained or were seen at the school in 2000 and 2001.
7. In October 1999, Hani El-Sayegh, a suspect in the 1996 Khobar Towers Bombing, was deported from a prison in Atlanta to Saudi Arabia.  This was the result of an agreement between Freeh and Prince Naif, Saudi Arabia’s interior minister. After his deportation, El-Sayegh was reportedly tortured as FBI agents watched and submitted questions to his Saudi interrogators. David Vine from the Washington Post remarked, “Such practices are sharply at odds with Freeh’s oft-stated message about the FBI’s need to respect human dignity and the tenets of democracy while fighting crime.”[30] Another problem with this incident was that the U.S. had control over a suspect in the 1996 terrorist murder of 19 U.S. servicemen and yet, instead of bringing that suspect to trial, they sent him back to Saudi Arabia. A reporter from Time magazine expressed the problem this way: “Run that one by again: The United States doesn’t want to try a man suspected of a bomb attack that killed Americans—and they’re sending him home?!”[31]  It is presumed that El-Sayegh was ultimately executed by the Saudis.[32]
8. In April 2000, a Pakistani from England named Niaz Khan told the FBI that he was recruited by al Qaeda, trained in Pakistan to hijack planes, and sent to the U.S. for a terror mission, as were several pilots.  Khan said that he told the FBI, about a year before 9/11, that al Qaeda planned to hijack airliners in the United States.[33]  The FBI confirmed that Khan passed two polygraphs. Yet FBI headquarters supposedly didn‘t believe Khan and sent him home to London.
9. When two of the alleged 9/11 hijackers, Khalid Al-Mihdhar and Nawaf Al-Hazmi, came to the U.S. in January 2000, they immediately met with Omar Al-Bayoumi, a suspected Saudi government spy and an employee of a Saudi aviation company.  Al-Bayoumi, who had been the subject of an FBI investigation in 1998 and 1999, became a very good friend to the two alleged hijackers, setting them up in an apartment and paying their rent.[34]  Al-Mihdhar and Al-Hazmi then moved in with a long-time FBI asset, Abdussattar Shaikh, who had been working closely with the Bureau on terrorism cases since 1994.  Apparently the FBI was not able to make a timely connection between its suspect Al-Bayoumi or its informant Shaikh and the two alleged 9/11 hijackers they supported for two years prior to 9/11.  In 2003, the FBI gave Shaikh $100,000 and closed his contract.[35]

From these nine incidents, we know that FBI management under Freeh was not working to prevent “Islamic” terrorism in the years before 9/11.  These examples also suggest that the FBI was suppressing and ignoring information about terrorism, perhaps for the purpose of protecting or co-opting the related terrorist networks.  As for al Qaeda, author Lawrence Wright wrote that, in the late 1990s, “Director Freeh repeatedly stressed in White House meetings that al Qaeda posed no domestic threat. Bin Laden didn’t even make the FBI’s most wanted list until June 1999,” nearly a year after the embassy bombings.[36]

Robert Hanssen, a veteran FBI counterintelligence agent, was arrested for espionage in February 2001.[37]  Freeh claimed the CIA and FBI worked very well together to catch Hanssen.  Apparently there was no difficulty, of the type later cited by the 9/11 Commission, that prevented collaboration between the two agencies.

It was claimed that Hanssen, while betraying his country for financial gain, sold a special software program called PROMIS to the Russians.  William Hamilton, the president of Inslaw, the company that manufactured PROMIS, said that the Russians then sold the program to Osama bin Laden and that it might have played a part in facilitating the 9/11 attacks.[38]  This claim was also reported by The Washington Times, and it was said that the software would have given Bin Laden the ability to monitor US efforts to track him down and also the ability to monitor electronic-banking transactions, enabling money-laundering operations.[39]

PROMIS had a history going back over two decades.  In the 1980s, Oliver North of Iran-Contra fame had used the software to create lists of national security threats in conjunction with the secretive Continuity of Government (COG) program.  In an interesting coincidence, before his death British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the House of Commons that “Al Qaeda” was not really a terrorist group but a database of international Mujahideen and arms smugglers used by the CIA and Saudis.[40]

The Justice Department oversight committee on the use of PROMIS included Rudy Giuliani and, therefore presumably, Louis Freeh.  The lawyer for Inslaw, in its legal dealings with the Justice Department, was Roderick M. Hills, who would shortly thereafter be Frank Carlucci’s boss at Sears World Trade.

Investigator Michael Ruppert and his colleagues have proposed that software programs evolving from PROMIS were used on 9/11 to disable the U.S. air defenses.  This hypothesis involves Mitre Corporation and its contractor PTech, which were known to be operating at the Pentagon on projects that affected the operability of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) systems.[41]  It is not clear how a database program might have evolved into an executable aviation control program, but there are other reasons to consider PTech.

After 9/11, the FBI did not report known links between PTech and its Saudi investor Yassin al Qadi to the U.S. Customs Department investigation into terrorist financing.  This concealment was despite PTech having contracts with many U.S. agencies controlling sensitive information, including the FBI, and Al-Qadi being declared a terrorist financier.  It is also known that PTech director Yaqub Mirza had contacts at high levels within the FBI.[42]

Working for the Bush Administration

The month before Hanssen’s arrest, George W. Bush was inaugurated as President. The only cabinet-level figure to be retained from the outgoing Clinton administration was CIA Director George Tenet, who was said to be a long-time friend of George H. W. Bush. But Freeh stayed on as well until his unexpected resignation in May that year.  Freeh did not give specific reasons for leaving at the time and he remained in the position until June 25.

Having been FBI Director for eight years, Freeh had put most of the FBI’s leadership in place.  This included his deputy as of 1999, Thomas Pickard, who would go on to be acting director of the FBI from June to September 2001.  It also included Dale Watson, head of the FBI’s counterterrorism program as of 1999, and the people in his organization.  Watson had worked with Freeh in the New York FBI office years before and had worked on the investigations into the U.S. embassy bombings and the bombing of the USS Cole.  Between FBI assignments, in 1996 and 1997, Watson had been the Deputy Chief of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center.

Working for Watson in the FBI’s counterterrorism division was Michel Rolince, the head of the International Terrorism Operations Section (ITOS).  Under Rolince were the heads of the Usama Bin laden Unit (UBLU) and the Radical Fundamentalism Unit (RFU).