With all due respect, Wright never found why they CIA withheld this information from the FBI Cole bombing investigators. He relied mainly on interviews of FBI agents who also were in the dark.
Now, assuming that it wasn’t sheer ill will on the C.I.A.’s part, why would it withhold that information?
Well, there are various theories. One is that the C.I.A. simply wanted to hang on to the information for itself. The agency was afraid of disclosing something to the F.B.I. that would then come out in a trial. Once intelligence is made public, it’s no longer useful to the agency. There are people in the F.B.I. who believed that the C.I.A. had hoped to recruit, as informers, the two Al Qaeda cell members who arrived in America in 2000. It had nobody inside the Al Qaeda organization, and here were two members of the inner circle, in America. I think the most likely answer to your question is that the problem was a mix of personality clashes and the C.I.A. being overwhelmed by the number of threats that were coming in at that time.
Q&A with Lawrence Wright
In all of the reports on 9/11 spanning several thousand pages of information I have found not even one piece of information backing up any of these theories. There were only three know al Qaeda terrorists inside of the US known to the CIA prior to 9/11, Zacarias Moussaoui, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, and by August 16 Moussaoui had already been arrested by the INS at the behest of the Minneapolis FBI. It is hard to image how providing information on just two known al Qaeda terrorists inside of the US to the FBI would overwhelm the CIA with over 20,000 employees. Maybe someone can explain this.
In point of fact the CIA did provide this information to FBI HQ, to both FBI Agent Dina Corsi and to her boss, Rod Middleton. Corsi and Middleton never provided this information, that Mihdhar and Hazmi had been involved in the planning of the Cole bombing, to the FBI Cole bombing investigators, who desperately wanted to search for these al Qaeda terrorists before these terrorists had time to carry out yet another al Qaeda terrorists attack. The FBI Cole bombing investigators were told by Middleton and Corsi, that since these al Qaeda terrorists had engaged in no crime, and the information in Corsi’s EC to start any investigation for Mihdhar and Hazmi had come from the NSA, they were forbidden to take part in any investigation for Mihdhar and Hazmi. But Corsi had in fact been given permission by the NSA the day before she shut down the FBI criminal investigation of Mihdhar and Hazmi, so she had absolutely no legal right to shut down this investigation.
But both Corsi and Middleton, and Tom Wilshire, the former deputy chief of the CIA Bin Laden unit and the deputy chief of their FBI ITOS unit who was actually directing their actions and the even entire hierarchy of the CIA were aware of this information and were even aware that Mihdhar and Hazmi were inside of the US only in order to take part in a massive al Qaeda attack that would kill thousands of Americans. They therefore knew when they allowed Corsi, Middleton and Wilshire to shut down the FBI criminal investigation of Mihdhar and Hazmi, that thousands of Americans would perish as a direct result of their actions.
But all of the information on why the CIA and FBI HQ had withheld this information from the FBI Cole bombing investigators ultimately ended up in the DOJ IG report and the other reports on the events on 9/11. When these reports were all aggregated together with other information, the account of Soufan, the 9/11 Commission report, the Joint Inquiry report, the account of the White House meeting on July 10, 2001 between Rice Clarke, and Blee, Black, and Tenet, in Bob Woodward’s book State of Denial, the January 2007 article in Harpers on Richard Blee, and the Defense Exhibits in the Moussaoui trial it was possible to piece this entire account back together again.
Why didn't the 9/11 Commission get to the bottom of the withholding?
The 9/11 Commission had all of the exact same documents that I had, even all of the DOJ IG transcripts of the interviews from the very CIA officers and FBI HQ agents that had taken part in withholding critical information from the FBI Cole bombing investigators and then illegally shut down their investigation of Mihdhar and Hazmi. So they could have provided a complete account of 9/11 and never did. Since they had all of the necessary information it looks like they clearly were actually chartered to cover over the crimes at the CIA and FBI HQ that had allowed the al Qaeda terrorists to carry out the attacks on 9/11. By comparing the information that is now known on 9/11 with what the 9/11 Commission reported, in is clear that the 9/11 Commission was nothing but a giant cover up, a complete fraud on the American people, to hide the crimes at the CIA and FBI that had allowed the attacks on 9/11.
