Pod Insights The Tucker Carlson Show The 9/11 Files: From Tragedy to Tyranny | Ep 5 About this episode Kristen Breitweiser—a 9/11 widow turned activist—and John Kiriakou—the CIA whistleblower who exposed the government’s secret torture program- reveal how the 9/11 Commission helped Bush win reelection, expanded government spying, and gave the CIA cover for brutal torture—all while officials cashed in and the public paid the price.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:28 Tucker Carlson? The 9/11 Commission failed to fulfill the single task it was charged with: explaining how 9/11 happened and why. Instead, it lied. But the 9/11 Commission did achieve another goal.
0:38 Speaker 02 Bush is winning, baby!
0:40 Tucker Carlson? It protected the Bush administration, which went on to win a resounding reelection victory in the 2004 elections. It also provided a basis to radically transform our country and our way of life in the United States. The final 70 pages of the 9/11 report detail a long list of recommended reforms. Those so-called reforms radically expanded the power of the very same agencies that failed to protect the United States from the terror attacks.
1:05 Speaker 03 With my signature, this law will give intelligence and law enforcement officials important new tools to fight a present danger.
1:15 Tucker Carlson? Some of those changes, like the Patriot Act, passed before the Commission even issued its report.
1:20 Speaker 04 We did not need new laws to allow wiretapping and surveillance because in all of the channels for the FBI, CIA, NSA, DIA, we had every bit of information we needed to stop the terrorists.
1:33 Tucker Carlson? Kristen Breitweiser is a lawyer. She's also a 9/11 widow who has spent decades pushing for accountability for what happened on 9/11.
1:40 Speaker 04 The attacks 100% should have been prevented, could have been prevented. The US government had everything it needed to stop the attacks.
1:48 Tucker Carlson? And yet, rather than blame the agencies for their obvious failures, Congress gave the deep state power to access your business records, including your library and bookstore records, with minimal to no judicial oversight, as if you did something wrong. Congress permitted roving wiretaps of multiple phones without specifying a specific target. Congress authorized unconstitutional search... of homes and businesses without any notification at all. Congress created something called national security letters, which enabled the FBI to get personal records without any court's approval, and also gave the FBI power to issue gag orders. So you couldn't tell anyone they were doing this.
2:25 Speaker 04 We were already wiretapping and doing surveillance just fine before the Patriot Act. So again, the attacks could have been prevented 100%. We had all the information we needed to stop the attacks. We had the hijackers fully identified. We knew exactly where they were going and we knew what they were up to. We knew that the Patriot Act, FISA warrants, they're not needed because we already had all the information we needed before 9/11 to stop the attacks.
2:51 Tucker Carlson? In 2007, the National Security Agency created the PRISM program that conducted warrantless surveillance of your phone calls, your emails and your internet activity. Much of this surveillance was conducted on American citizens who'd done nothing wrong.
3:04 Speaker 05 My name is John Kiriakou, K-I-R-I-A-K-O-U. I'm a former CIA counterterrorism officer, former chief of counterintelligence in Alex Station, and I was in CIA counterterrorism center on 9/11. Within hours of the attacks, in retrospect, it's much more clear. The CIA changed from an intelligence service who saw its job as recruiting spies to steal secrets and then to analyze those secrets so policymakers could make the best informed policy to a paramilitary organization
3:46 Speaker 05 whose job it was to capture and/or kill anybody who could pose a threat to the United States. I went to Pakistan as the chief of CIA counterterrorism operations in January of 2002, and I was given no specific orders. So on my very first day in Pakistan, I went to see the station chief and I said, "What do you want me to do?" And he said, "I want you to come up with a plan to take down a terrorist safe house." I went back to my desk with a legal pad and thought to myself, "All right, what would I do to take down a terrorist safe house?" And I wrote at the top of the page, "O200", because I would want it to be dark.
4:28 Speaker 05 And then I thought, well, 9/11 is still an open criminal investigation, so I'd have to invite the FBI along, and I would have to invite the Pakistani intelligence service, because, after all, it's their country. I figured I would need battering rams, guns, ammunition, walkie-talkies, a satellite dish, encrypted communications, all different sorts of things, which I ordered on my CIA credit card. It arrived just days later in Pakistan. But the idea was, we take the battering ram, we break down the door, and we grab everybody inside, and then lock them up in whatever local jail happened to be the nearest. And so that's what we started to do.
5:09 Speaker 05 In our first operation, we found two Tunisian teenagers, both 18 or 19 years old. They both burst into tears. One asked if he could call his mother, and it was almost disarming. It was shocking that this was the fearsome Al Qaeda that we were so afraid of. And then we started doing more of these, from one a week, to two a week, to three a week. Sometimes we would do two in a night. And we started capturing more and more important people, members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, for example, members of Uzbek extremist groups. And so we would just take them to the Rawalpindi jail in the nearby city of Rawalpindi. We got to the point where we actually filled the Rawalpindi jail.
5:53 Speaker 05 There was just no room to squeeze one more Al Qaeda fighter in it. And so my Pakistani counterpart came to me and said, "Look, the jail's full. You have to get these guys out." I didn't know what to do with them. So I called CIA headquarters. I said, "The Paks want these Al Qaeda guys out. What do I do with them?" And I was told to put them on a transport plane and send them to Guantanamo. I said, "Guantanamo, Cuba? Why would we send them to Cuba?" And my colleague in Washington said, "Well, we've come up with a plan."
6:27 Tucker Carlson? The plan was to detain hundreds of people, including US citizens, without formal charges or any trial.
6:33 Speaker 05 This was a multi-pronged plan: to detain prisoners indefinitely, to carry out torture on some of them, which at the time were called "enhanced interrogation techniques," and to either render or extraordinarily render others.
6:55 Tucker Carlson? Things were changing here in America, too. The 9/11 Commission recommended creating a new "super spy" called the Director of National Intelligence and placing that person inside the White House. They insisted on expanding the TSA, which now degrades millions of innocent air travelers with full-body scans, pat-downs, luggage screenings, and multiple unconstitutional searches every time they enter an airport. The explanation for these changes was that they would keep America safe. But most of the intelligence that was gathered from detainees was obtained through illegal torture, justified by a 2002 DOJ torture memo, which greenlit the use of waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, and small-space confinement for interrogations.
7:38 Speaker 05 Think of it this way: in 1946, we executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American prisoners of war, right? Waterboarding was a death penalty crime.
7:53 Speaker 05 In January of 1968, The Washington Post ran a front-page photograph of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner. On the morning that that picture was published, the Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara, ordered an investigation. The soldier was arrested, he was charged with torture, he was convicted, and sentenced to 20 years at hard labor at Fort Leavenworth.
8:20 Speaker 05 The law never changed, but somehow in 2002, like magic, the George W. Bush administration's attorneys at the Justice Department, the CIA, and the National Security Council decided, "We didn't have to pay any attention to that law, and because we were the good guys, we could do anything we wanted." And that's how the torture program came to be.
8:44 Tucker Carlson? The CIA set up secret black sites to conduct torture around the world. There were sites in Afghanistan, Poland, Romania, Thailand, and many other countries.
8:52 Speaker 05 Many of these places were so secret that the presidents and prime ministers of the countries that they were in had no idea that there was a secret CIA prison in their country. These were handshake deals between George Tenet, the director of the CIA, and whoever happened to be director of the intelligence service in those countries. The reason why there were so many of them was not because we had so many prisoners that we needed multiple locations. It's that word was bound to leak out that these places existed. And so if word leaked out about Prison A, well, by then, all the prisoners had been moved to Prison B.
9:34 Tucker Carlson? Most of what we know about the al-Qaeda plans for 9/11 was obtained through torture.
9:39 Speaker 04 The part of the commission's report that talks about the plot, the actual story of how the hijackers met, how the plan was devised, comes from "questioning" of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin Al Sheeb, who were two detainees that were in custody. It was based on torture. Anyone who knows anything about torture knows that any information gleaned through torture is not reliable, it's not credible.
10:07 Tucker Carlson? The CIA knew full well that the information it was gathering wasn't credible. Detainees made false confessions under pressure. Those detainees included 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
10:18 Speaker 05 Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is probably the best example here. He confessed to, for example, murdering Daniel Pearl. Daniel Pearl was a Wall Street Journal reporter who came to Pakistan in early 2002. He was there to meet with a Pakistani extremist with whom he had been emailing for about six months. He went on to do the interview and... Months later, his head was found in a vacant lot and his torso was found on the other side of town. Well, we know who killed Daniel Pearl. He was arrested, he confessed. He pointed the Pakistani authorities to Daniel Pearl's torso and he was sentenced to life in prison.
11:03 Speaker 05 But Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, during torture at the hands of CIA officers, also confessed to killing Daniel Pearl. We knew he didn't kill Daniel Pearl, but the torture was so severe, he was telling his CIA interviewers, interrogators, anything that he thought they wanted to hear just to get them to stop torturing him.
11:26 Tucker Carlson? What was true and what wasn't true? We'll never know the answer to that question. But remarkably, many details of the CIA's torture program are still not publicly acknowledged. They're still secret.
11:37 Speaker 05 Waterboarding has received the most media attention. It's actually quite simple. You strap a prisoner to a board. His feet and legs are elevated compared to his face. Cloth or burlap or something is put in his mouth to keep him from drowning. And while his head is immobilized, water is poured on his mouth. So of course, water's gonna get through the cloth and get down your throat and it makes you feel like you're drowning. It causes panic. You tense your muscles to the point where it becomes painful. And in the case of one prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, Zain al-Abedin Muhammad Hussain, he actually did drown.
12:22 Speaker 05 His heart stopped beating and he had to be revived by a CIA doctor performing CPR so that he could be tortured more. I never thought waterboarding was the worst technique. I thought that there were others that were worse. Now, the easiest technique was called the attention grasp. You grab somebody by the shirt and say, "Answer my questions." That's not torture. The second one was a slap on the belly, called the belly slap. It makes a cracking sound, it's a little bit humiliating, it leaves a handprint. It's probably not torture. The third one was a slap across the face. That's humiliating, but again, reasonable people can agree to disagree about whether it's torture. But then they got...
13:07 Speaker 05 progressively worse. The next one was called walling, where you roll a towel and put the towel around the prisoner's neck. And then you slam him repeatedly into a plywood wall. The plywood has a little bit of give, and the towel ensures that the prisoner doesn't get whiplash. But the CIA never used a towel, and the wall was made out of concrete block. And so, they did such damage to prisoners that several of them have permanent traumatic brain injury and are unable to participate in their own defenses. The Justice Department never said you could smash somebody's head against a concrete wall
13:51 Speaker 05 until his brain was jelly. But that's exactly what the CIA did. There were others that were even worse. One was called the cold cell, where a prisoner is stripped naked. He's chained to an eye bolt in the ceiling, so he can't get comfortable. He can't sit, or kneel, or lay. He's standing 24 hours a day. The cell is chilled to 50 degrees Fahrenheit. And then every hour, a CIA officer goes into the cell and throws a bucket of ice water on him. Now, we murdered prisoners using that technique. And again, the Justice Department never said, "Feel free to just murder these people by freezing them to death and giving them hypothermia." That's exactly what the CIA did.
14:34 Speaker 05 There was another one that was actually quite controversial, and that was sleep deprivation.
14:38 Tucker Carlson? In the now-unklassified legal memo in which Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed off on counter-resistance techniques at Gitmo in interrogations, Rumsfeld responded to the sleep deprivation technique by saying, "I stand at my desk for 8 to 10 hours a day. Why is standing limited for 4 hours?"
14:56 Speaker 05 But the CIA wasn't talking about keeping people awake at their stand-up desks for 24 hours. What they would do to these prisoners is, again, strip them naked, chain them to an eye bolt in the ceiling with industrial-strength lights on them 24 hours a day, and death metal blasting at a volume of 11 24 hours a day.
15:20 Speaker 05 They went crazy after a few days of that and then just began to die.
15:25 Tucker Carlson? Publicly, the Bush administration pretended none of this was happening. They lied.
15:29 Speaker 03 This government does not torture people.
15:31 Speaker 05 I said to my wife, who was also a senior CIA officer, "He is a bald-faced liar. He is looking the American people directly in the eye and he's lying to them."
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18:48 Tucker Carlson? First.
18:49 Speaker 05 In October of 2001, a CIA officer, and it's still unclear after all those years who that person was, introduced two outside psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, to the Director of the CIA. And they pitched to him over this dinner their idea of enhanced interrogation techniques. They wrote this up as a memo that was referred to the CIA's covert action staff. The covert action staff approved it and sent it to the CIA General Counsel's office. The General Counsel liked the idea and sent it to the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department.
19:31 Speaker 05 They approved it despite the fact that torture was specifically outlawed from 1945.
19:41 Speaker 05 They approved it and sent it to the National Security Council, General Counsel. After his signature, it went to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. And after Rice approved it, it went to the President. And as soon as the President signed it, the CIA began torturing its prisoners.
20:02 Tucker Carlson? At its peak, Guantanamo Bay held 780 detainees.
20:06 Speaker 05 I remember at the time, thinking, you know, these guys have been in Guantanamo for a long time, and we're not hearing anything about trials, or jury selection, or federal charges, or anything. And a colleague said to me, "Oh, the Vice President nixed that." It was Vice President Dick Cheney who decided, or realized, or concluded that while at Guantanamo, these men had no rights.
20:33 Tucker Carlson? To this day, almost none of them has been charged with a crime. The vast majority of them are innocent.
20:39 Speaker 05 Upwards of 80 or 85% of the people that we had at Guantanamo were innocent people who were scooped up in these dragnet. Most of them were Afghan citizens, or Pakistani citizens, who were involved in disputes with neighbors. Maybe, maybe they had loaned money to a neighbor, and the neighbor didn't want to pay it back. So he would call the Americans and say, "Hey, my neighbor is Al Qaeda." The US Army, or the CIA grabs the guy, puts him on a flight to Guantanamo, and nobody ever sees him again.
21:11 Tucker Carlson? On December 10, 2007, John Kerryakou became a whistleblower. He told ABC News about the torture policies.
21:18 Speaker 05 In an interview with ABC News, I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners, that torture was official US government policy, it was not the result of a rogue, and that the policy had been personally approved by the President.
21:32 Tucker Carlson? The government responded immediately with viciousness and ferocity. They treated Kerryakou much tougher than the Clinton administration had ever treated Osama bin Laden.
21:40 Speaker 05 Within 24 hours, the CIA filed a document with the FBI called a crimes report, saying that I had disclosed classified information to the media.
21:54 Speaker 05 That's a crime under the Espionage Act. The FBI investigated me from December of 2007 until December of 2008. And in December of 2008, they sent my attorneys something called a declination letter, declining to prosecute me. They said that torture was a crime, and that we have a law in the United States that says you cannot classify a crime for the purpose of keeping the information from the American people. And so, I was not charged with a crime. Three weeks later, Barack Obama became president, and he named John Brennan Deputy National Security Advisor for Counterterrorism.
22:38 Speaker 05 John Brennan was one of the godfathers of the CIA's torture program. And he sent a memo to Eric Holder, saying, "Charge him with espionage." Eric Holder wrote back and said, "My people don't think he committed espionage." And Brennan wrote back again to Holder, saying, "Charge him anyway and make him defend himself." I had no idea that my phones were tapped, that my emails were being intercepted, or that teams of FBI agents were following me everywhere I went for the next three years. And finally, in January of 2012,
23:21 Speaker 05 I was arrested by the FBI and charged with five felonies, including three counts of espionage, which in many cases is a death penalty charge.
23:33 Tucker Carlson? In the end, Kirakou was the only person at CIA to go to prison for anything related to 9/11. His crime: telling the truth about what the CIA was doing. In fact, despite the CIA's previously unknown role in recruiting the hijackers and their relentless stonewalling to the 9/11 Commission, the CIA was, on net, maybe the biggest winner from 9/11.
23:56 Speaker 05 In a perverse way, 9/11 is one of the best things that ever happened to the CIA for a number of reasons.
24:01 Tucker Carlson? In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, CIA Director Tenet offered a novel approach to taking out the Taliban. Just use the CIA. And it worked. The CIA was the first US agency to deploy to Afghanistan that year. A paramilitary team called Jawbreaker arrived in Afghanistan on September 26, 2001.
24:20 Speaker 05 The first... A handful of teams that were sent to Afghanistan were sent there specifically to liaise with the Northern Alliance, to push the Taliban out of power, and to capture or kill every Al Qaeda fighter they could encounter. That extended then to Pakistan by the end of the year 2001.
24:43 Tucker Carlson? The context here is important. After the end of the Cold War, it wasn't exactly clear what the CIA would do. They'd spent 40 years fighting the Soviets. What next?
24:52 Speaker 05 In the mid-'90s, President Bill Clinton, who was really no fan of the CIA, cut the CIA's budget. And that was the first time that the CIA had had a budget cut since the Carter administration in the late 1970s. On the day after 9/11, the CIA got
25:13 Speaker 05 a budget supplement of
25:19 Speaker 05 10 figures. The amount is still classified. But I actually went up to the Counterterrorism Center chief, Cofer Black at the time. This was about five, six days after 9/11. And I said, "Cofer, I have an idea for an operation that I want to put past you." And he put up his hands, and he said, "Whatever it is, just do it. I have so much money, I can't possibly spend it all." So we all began flying business class all over the world. There are famous stories of CIA officers throwing sacks of money out of the side of helicopters, which gave rise to a joke at the agency that you can't buy an Afghan warlord, but you can certainly rent one.
26:05 Speaker 05 And that's what we were doing.
26:06 Tucker Carlson? The CIA provided millions of dollars in direct cash payment to anti-Taliban groups, along with weapons and communications support. By November 2001, it was the CIA's Special Activities Division, not the US military, that had taken Kabul and the fortress called Mazari Sharif. The CIA targeted Bin Laden as early as December 2001. But as was so often the case during the tenure of George Tenet, the CIA failed to capture Bin Laden. Tenet became CIA Director in 1997, just as Bin Laden was issuing his first fatwa against the United States. A leader with integrity would have resigned in shame after missing obvious warnings about a major attack. But Tenet had no shame. The additional resources and powers the CIA received did not lead to better outcomes.
26:50 Tucker Carlson? On March 20, 2003, the US invaded Iraq. It did so based on false intelligence that came from, yes, the CIA run by George Tenet.
27:01 Speaker 07 The United States knows that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.
27:06 Tucker Carlson? It was all lies, but in Washington, failure is seen as success and rewarded. By 2015, the CIA's public budget had risen to $15 billion, 500% higher than it was in the mid-1990s, when they were fighting for post-Cold War relevance. And by the way, that's simply the public budget. Much of CIA's funding remains classified. The FBI was also rewarded for failing to protect America. By 2023, the FBI's budget was almost $11 billion. That's up from $3.3 billion the year of the 9/11 attacks. But none of it made America safer.
27:41 Speaker 05 Before 9/11, Silicon Valley had the highest concentration of millionaires anywhere in America. But post-9/11, Washington DC has the highest concentration of millionaires anywhere in America. And it's because Congress put so many billions upon billions of dollars in counterterrorism and in intelligence, including in literally thousands of federal contractors called Beltway Bandits, that everybody got rich.
28:17 Tucker Carlson? After the attacks, the FBI radically shifted agent resources to its top priorities. Those were counterterrorism and counterintelligence and cybercrime. Traditional crime fighting took a backseat. The FBI's drug program has sustained by far the largest reduction in FBI agent workforce, about 550 positions, or more than 80% of the non-supervisory field agents who are permanently reprogrammed. Not surprisingly, this reduction in drug fighting aligned with the deadliest drug epidemic in American history. More than a million Americans died.
28:51 Speaker 05 I am not only not a conspiracy theorist, I'm about as far away from being a conspiracy theorist as a person can be.
29:01 Speaker 05 But I'm also a realist, and I made the first half of my career at the CIA as an analyst. And to come to an analytic judgment, you have to look at the evidence. Well, the evidence surrounding 9/11 says that there is a far greater story there than we have been led to believe.
29:22 Tucker Carlson? Many of the people involved in this story should be in prison today, but of course they're not. That's the real story of 9/11. It's the story of winners and losers. On the day of the attacks, the losers were the 2,977 civilians who were murdered. It was the children who found out their parents weren't coming home. The New Yorkers who witnessed the smoke rising from their city. It was the firemen and cops who rushed into the towers to save those trapped inside and died. In the aftermath of the attack, the losers were the nearly 7,000 US servicemembers who were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the 52,000 who were wounded in action there. The losers of the American people, the rest of us who lived in a country permanently
30:04 Tucker Carlson? transformed, stripped of its fundamental constitutional rights, were $7 trillion poorer with nothing to show for it. Abroad, the losers were even more numerous. Nearly 5 million people were killed in the post-9/11 wars, most of them civilians. Entire countries were destroyed, the world was destabilized. And then there were the winners. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, President George W. Bush enjoyed the highest approval ratings in the history of modern politics. He leveraged that popularity to launch a decade of regime change wars. In 2002, he defied the odds in the midterm elections and expanded his party's majority in the Congress. In 2004, he became the first Republican presidential candidate in decades to win reelection with a majority of the popular vote.
30:47 Tucker Carlson? When Bush arrived in office in 2000, he was worth about $20 million. Today, some estimates say he's worth more than $50 million. Bush lives in Texas today. He spends most of his time painting and riding his bike.
31:01 Tucker Carlson? National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who spent most of 2001 ignoring the steady stream of very clear warnings about an imminent terror attack, got a promotion. In 2005, she became the Secretary of State. She received the overwhelming support from the United States Senate. Since then, Rice has enriched herself by serving on numerous corporate boards and is Director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where she is a professor. Disgraced CIA Director George Tenet, meanwhile, retired from the CIA in 2004, about a year after he provoked the invasion of Iraq. He got a sinecure as a professor at Georgetown University, not surprisingly. He authored multiple books, and, as so many in the CIA do, he joined the Board of Directors of multiple defense contractors. Tenet also spent more
31:43 Tucker Carlson? than a decade at an investment bank. After leaving the CIA, he was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush. That's the nation's highest civilian honor. John Brennan, the Saudi station chief who helped the hijackers get their passports, blocked Alex Station from getting basic biographical details about Osama bin Laden, and personally worked to ensure that John Kerry Q ended up going to prison for telling the truth about what the CIA was doing, ended up running the CIA itself. He was appointed by Barack Obama to be Director. While running the CIA, Brennan was caught hacking the computers of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Brennan lied about that and never faced consequences for that lie. After leaving the CIA, he played a central role in the Russiagate hoax that
32:24 Tucker Carlson? dominated Donald Trump's first term. He obtained a sinecure at the University of Texas and became an MSNBC contributor. Kofa Black, who ran the Counterterrorism Center, left the public sector for a successful career as a defense contractor. In 2017, maybe inevitably, he joined Hunter Biden on the board of Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company. Paul Wolfowitz, the Pentagon official who began calling for an invasion of Iraq just hours after the 9/11 attacks, ended up getting the war he wanted. He also got a promotion. In 2005, Paul Wolfowitz became the President of the World Bank. He resigned two years later during a corruption scandal. In 2016, Paul Wolfowitz endorsed Hillary Clinton. And finally, there's Philip Zelico, the man behind the dishonest commission report.
33:06 Tucker Carlson? After finishing his time as Executive Director of the Commission, Zelico got What he always wanted, more power. His good friend Condoleezza Rice rewarded him for the work he did on the commission. Zelikow became counselor of the State Department, where he acted as Rice's deputy. He has since served on too many boards to mention. He's also served as an advisor to the Obama administration and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Zelikow is a professor at the University of Virginia, where he served as dean of the graduate school. His work on the commission masterfully avoided any form of accountability or blame for the attacks. It was, from beginning to end, a lie. In the end, Zelikow blamed the government's failures on a failure of imagination. Not surprisingly, imagination has never been indicted for it.
33:50 Tucker Carlson? It's been more than 20 years now, and we still don't know the simple truth about 9/11. But we can know. A new commission could find out. An honest commission, a nonpartisan commission, a commission dedicated to protecting the United States, could find out. It could answer the questions that have hung in the air since that day. What role did John Brennan play in facilitating the attacks? Why did he seem to be working for the hijackers? What CIA official made the decision to attempt to recruit those hijackers? Why did the Bush administration ignore dozens of clear warning signs? Why did the Clinton administration repeatedly refuse to kill or capture Osama bin Laden?
34:31 Tucker Carlson? Who made the decision to ship the rubble from 9/11 off Manhattan and out of the country before an investigation could be done? Why did Tower 7 collapse even though it was hit by no airplane? What's in the NSA files that the commission never bothered to check? Which investors profited from the attacks? The government knows the name of the investor who profited from the attacks. Who knew they were coming? Why haven't they told us? And in the end, who benefited most from 9/11? What foreign countries benefited from 9/11? What did foreign intel services know about the attacks before they happened? A commission could find these answers.
35:13 Tucker Carlson? That commission would have broad subpoena power, enough funding and personnel to get those answers. After more than 20 years, the American people have a right, an absolute right, to those answers. They should be outraged by the lying, and they should demand to know what actually happened on September 11.
35:34 Tucker Carlson? This episode concludes The 9/11 Files. Thank you for watching. We made this series because the American people, particularly the families of the victims, but really all of us, all of us who lived in this nation that was totally transformed by 9/11, deserve to know why it happened and what exactly happened on that day. None of this would have been possible without the support of our members, subscribers to TCN. For them, we are grateful. We'd still be working at some totally controlled TV network if it weren't for you. So if you're not a member, join us at TuckerCarlson.com to unlock our entire library ad-free, get early access to all of our shows and series, plus The 9/11 Files Watch Companion. It's a clear, easy-to-follow roadmap to the evidence that our team uncovered about 9/11. Join us today at TuckerCarlson.com. Be part of
36:18 Tucker Carlson? our fight, ever ongoing, to uncover the truth.
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