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FBI covered up Florida Saudi family’s link to 9/11 jihad

Jul 1, 2014 8:32 pm By Robert Spencer

Prestancia home of Saudis“This release suggests that the FBI has covered up information that is vitally important to public safety.” This family abruptly fled the country shortly before 9/11, “leaving behind three vehicles, food in the refrigerator and toys in the swimming pool.” Mohammed Atta may have visited their home. Yet for years, the FBI insisted that they had nothing to do with the 9/11 jihad plot, and has been extremely reticent about sharing information about their investigation.

Whom is the FBI protecting, and why?

“FBI records: Chilling find in Bradenton dumpster,” by Dan Christensen and Anthony Summers, Miami Herald, July 1, 2014 (thanks to Halal Pork Shop):

Freshly released but heavily censored FBI documents include tantalizing new information about events connected to the Sarasota Saudis who moved suddenly out of their home about two weeks before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, leaving behind clothing, jewelry and cars.

The documents were released to BrowardBulldog.org Monday amid ongoing Freedom of Information Act litigation. The news organization sued in 2012 after being denied access to the FBI’s file on a once-secret investigation focusing on Abdulaziz al-Hijji, his wife, Anoud, and her father, Esam Ghazzawi, an advisor to a Saudi prince.

An FBI letter accompanying the documents, the fourth batch to be released since the lawsuit was filed, cites national security and other reasons to justify why certain information was withheld. The letter does not explain why the documents were not previously acknowledged to exist.

One FBI report, dated April 3, 2002, recounts a chilling discovery made by the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office on Halloween 2001.

Deputies were called after a man with a Tunisian passport was observed disposing of items in a dumpster behind a storage facility he had rented in Bradenton.

The man’s name is blanked out, but the report says authorities who searched the dumpster found “a self-printed manual on terrorism and Jihad, a map of the inside of an unnamed airport, a rudimentary last will and testament, a weight to fuel ratio calculation for a Cessna 172 aircraft, flight training information from the Flight Training Center in Venice [Fla.] and printed maps of Publix shopping centers in Tampa Bay.”

The Flight Training Center is where 9/11 hijack pilot Ziad Jarrah, who was at the controls of United Airlines Flight 93 when it crashed in Shanksville, Pa, took flying lessons.

The three paragraphs that follow are completely blanked out. The reasons cited include information “specifically authorized under criteria established by [presidential] executive order to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy.”

The documents were located via court-ordered text searches using the names of the al-Hijjis and Ghazzawi. U.S. District Judge William J. Zloch in Fort Lauderdale is currently reviewing more than 80,000 pages of 9/11 records.

“This release suggests that the FBI has covered up information that is vitally important to public safety,” said Miami attorney Thomas Julin, who represents BrowardBulldog.org. “It’s startling that after initially denying they had any documents they continue to find new documents as the weeks and months roll by. Each new batch suggests there are many, many more documents.”

“There needs to be a full-scale explanation of what’s going on here,” said Julin.

The report of the Bradenton incident includes information about the al-Hijjis. The redactions, however, keep secret how what happened there ties back to the al-Hijjis.

The same is true about another FBI document dated Feb. 2, 2012.

On that day, FBI offices in Tampa and Charlotte, North Carolina, received information from Washington stamped “secret” stating that a “person of interest” in the FBI’s massive 9/11 investigation had returned to the United States.

The person, whose name is redacted, was reported to be “traveling to Texas and LA for business/tourism.” The person apparently told authorities upon entering the country that he could be reached in Charlotte. He provided a telephone number “associated with furniture manufacturers in North Carolina,” the report states.

Details about that were blanked out. But the report also states, “Tampa is notified that a person of interest to Tampa regarding the PENTTBOMB investigation has a valid visa for re-entry into the U.S.” PENTTBOMB is the FBI’s code name for its 9/11 investigation.

In all, the FBI released 11 pages Monday. They contain statements reiterating that the al-Hijjis had departed the United States in haste shortly before 9/11 and that “further investigation” had “revealed many connections” between them and persons associated with “attacks on 9/11/2001.”

Those statements flatly contradict the FBI’s public statements that agents found no connection between the al-Hijjis and the 9/11 plot.

Yet they dovetail with the account of a counterintelligence source who has said investigators in 2001 found evidence — phone records and photographs of license plates snapped at the entrance to the al-Hijjis’ Sarasota-area neighborhood — that showed Mohamed Atta, other hijackers and former Broward resident and current al-Qaeda fugitive Adnan Shukrijumah had visited the al-Hijji home.

None of that information, or even the fact that an investigation in Sarasota took place, was disclosed by the FBI to Congress’ Joint Inquiry into the attacks or to the 9/11 Commission, according to former Florida U.S. Sen. Bob Graham. Graham co-chaired the joint inquiry.

The documents, while stamped secret, are marked as having been formally classified earlier this month in accordance with the National Security Information Security Classification. The parts of the documents that were not released are to be kept secret until 2039.

Among other things, the government asserted that classification is necessary because the censored information pertains to foreign relations or foreign activities, including confidential sources.

“This could be about information considered embarrassing to Saudi Arabia,” said Julin. Fifteen of the 19 suicide hijackers were Saudi nationals….

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Filed Under: Jihad in the U.S., Saudi Arabia Tagged With: featured


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Comments

  1. Andy says

    Jul 1, 2014 at 8:44 pm

    Everyone rips on Michael Moore for being a liberal douche, and maybe he is, but he touched on this stuff in his Farhenheit 9/11 movie, but everyone attacked him personally, but never really refuted the information.
    He did go off on too much of a tangent about the myth of the poor uneducated making up the bulk of the military.
    (I’m an upper middle-class, southern, white, college-educated member of the US Army)

    • Beagle says

      Jul 1, 2014 at 9:23 pm

      Moore’s most glaring mistake was seeming to suggest that Saudi, other Gulf Arab, CAIR-WTF, and other assorted political Islamic influence purchasing in the US was in any way limited to the Bush family, a particular party, or politics.

      Islamic centers at Harvard and Georgetown. What 2 universities would you influnce to affect US politics?

      Wahhabi League

    • wildjew says

      Jul 2, 2014 at 7:35 am

      I think Michael Moore got most of his information from investigative journalist and author Craig Unger author of “House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World’s Two Most Powerful Dynasties.”

      http://www.amazon.com/House-Bush-Saud-Relationship-Dynasties/dp/0743253396

      An abridged version of the book can be purchased at Audible.com where many of Spencer’s books are available. I recommend Unger’s book. It is sad that I had to look to left-leaning authors (I am not sure where Robert Baer, “Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude” is politically) to learn about this on-going incestuous relationship between George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush and our Saudi enemies. George W. Bush (I voted for him in 2000) became the first American president to make the establishment of a Muslim-enemy state in Israel a “formal goal of U.S. policy.” Bush codified the abomination in our national party platform August 2004 where it remains thanks to 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney.

      Few on the political right would touch this scandalous and perfidious behavior to our everlasting shame. Like the left circles the wagons around this criminal in the WH, even so conservatives (Limbaugh, Hannity, etc.) circled the wagons around Bush. I couldn’t get David Horowitz (as much as I tried) to move from his strong support for Bush.

      “To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.” (attributed to Abraham Lincoln)

    • Shane says

      Jul 2, 2014 at 5:08 pm

      He is a liberal douche, but he is probably right about their being a cover-up to protect the Saudi royal family and other Saudi billionaires. 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis and a lot of wealthy Saudi’s fled the USA after the 9/11 attacks.

  2. wtd says

    Jul 1, 2014 at 8:54 pm

    “… the FBI has covered up information that is vitally important to public safety.” This family abruptly fled the country shortly before 9/11, “leaving behind three vehicles, food in the refrigerator and toys in the swimming pool.” Mohammed Atta may have visited their home.

    This, combined with the prior report ,

    Islamic State caliph calls on Muslims worldwide to move to his new caliphate and wage jihad against Infidels

    begs the question . . .is ISIS/ISIL/IS so confident in their capabilities to strike the two satans that they openly invite their brethren to vacate the targeted battlefronts?

  3. Richie says

    Jul 1, 2014 at 9:36 pm

    Not shocking, as for reasons that make no sense, the US teats Saudi Arabia with kid gloves. Cut that fascist wasteland loose. That being said, I don’t believe 9/11 was in any way an inside job-Most 9/11 Truthers are leftist nutcases, projecting their own hatred of America onto the government, and almost all rabid anti semites- blaming it all on the Jews.
    The major coverup, if any, was the failure of the government to take seriously the threat of Islamic terrorism

    • Simon says

      Jul 1, 2014 at 10:31 pm

      The real “inconvenient truth” of today’s world is that the US dollar would devalue enormously under the massive current debt burden were it not for the Saudis and OPEC continuing to demand payment for their oil in the US dollar – the real meaning of the term “petrodollar.” The world needs an America unfettered by foreigners who would destroy the Constitution.

    • Angemon says

      Jul 2, 2014 at 12:00 pm

      The problem with most so-called “truthers” is that they don’t really want the truth unless it fits with their story. They’d believe a top-secret heat ray gun brought the WTC down before even considering islamic terrorists. A more accurate name for that kind of “truthers” would be “confirmation biasers”

  4. John C. Barile says

    Jul 1, 2014 at 10:08 pm

    My feeling is this: Let the Saudi princelings and their detestable Kingdom be totally consumed by the foul Beast that they engendered and nourished.

  5. VLParker says

    Jul 1, 2014 at 10:12 pm

    What is it with the FBI’s and the US military’s love affair with covering up islamic jihad. Do these people hate their own country and the principle of individual liberty. It’s insane.

  6. duh_swami says

    Jul 2, 2014 at 8:05 am

    Suspicious activity usually means something suspicious is going on. The ‘FBI’ seems to cover up a lot when it comes to Islam, and no one seems to know just why. This love affair accelerated under ‘Religion of Peace’ Bush, but it has taken off like a rocket since Rasool O became Prez. Islam is not yet the official religion of the US, but some officials act like it is.

  7. Uri says

    Jul 2, 2014 at 9:53 am

    Barbara

    Sarah Palin is that you?

    You sound as vapid as that bobble head

  8. Uri says

    Jul 2, 2014 at 9:53 am

    Barbara

    Sarah Palin is that you?

    You sound as vapid as that bobble head

  9. Peter says

    Jul 2, 2014 at 10:34 am

    Federal Bureau of Incompetence,

    or

    Islamophilia?

  10. n.a palm says

    Jul 2, 2014 at 1:56 pm

    9/11 Another Federal whitewash of a Saudi terrorist act. Add to the list:. Oklahoma City Bombing, AA Flight 597 TWA Flight 800.

  11. John A. Patriot says

    Jul 3, 2014 at 8:52 am

    And the plot thickens…

    Much needs to be ferreted out about exactly who was ‘allowed’ to depart the US in the hours after 9/11 on private family jets etc. bound for the bosom of the House of Saud when the only planes allowed in the air were military fighters and Air Force One. If it is proved that these foreign nationals departed BEFORE the attacks on 9/11 and in haste… it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out they had foreknowledge of the imminent attacks and beat a hasty departure in order to avoid potentially being detained & linked to the attacks; although as we know now the “powers that be” gave them all a free ticket to fly the coop no questions to be asked, no identities to be divulged, no information what so ever to be given to the American People as to “Who, What, Where or Why” these potential Terror Suspects were given a free pass to escape justice… Other than they are “Arab Oil” Money and not to be questioned…!!! That is the most disgusting part of the whole cover-up surrounding the 9/11 Commission and the mountain of information that was withheld by various agencies… it was OBVIOUS to ANYONE with half an interest to open their eyes that there was without a doubt people on those planes who KNEW about the activities of the terrorist cells, potential future follow-on attacks, additional support personal to the attackers on 9/11 who were VERY LIKLEY on that very plane… Not forgetting the money trails that would undoubtedly lead right back to the House of Saud… via this or that prince, advisor, or national. The House of Saud has been IN THIS UP TO THEIR VERY DNA… bin laden himself, but many of the various underlings and minor princes who dance back and forth across the line of terrorist affiliation… WORLD WIDE!!! They are without a doubt STILL supporting terror all around the world, all while they smile across the bankers tables and collect their oil revenue in lieu of BLOOD MONEY.

    SUPPORT AMERICAN OIL EFFORTS… DRILL BABY DRILL, Energy Independence from the Middle East is the ONLY way we are ever going to cut the chord of terrorist financial ties to the west…

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