Episode 425 – Blood on the Cutting Room Floor

by | Sep 20, 2022 | Podcasts, Videos | 17 comments

Do you think The Corbett Report’s new 5+ hour, 50,000 word documentary, False Flags: The Secret History of Al Qaeda, wasn’t long enough? Do you think it missed key parts of the Al Qaeda myth and failed to document important parts of the War of Terror story? Well, so do I! Today, let’s take a tour of the cutting room floor and see what was left out of the documentary.

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SHOW NOTES:

Lysander Spooner: The Anarchist Who Single-Handedly Took on the US Post Office

False Flags: The Secret History of Al Qaeda

Saga of Dr. Zawahri Sheds Light On the Roots of al Qaeda Terror

The Man Behind bin Laden

Basra prison incident

CLIP 1 TRANSCRIPT – “Bin Laden family” from Part 2

The idea of Osama bin Laden as the leader of a radical global terror movement itself raises a number of questions about his ties to the world of intelligence. As we have seen, despite repeated official denials, reports of Osama bin Laden’s direct connections to US intelligence—including his own brother’s 1985 assertion that Osama was “the liaison between the US, the Saudi government, and the Afghan rebels” during the Soviet-Afghan war—persisted. Regardless of the precise nature of that relationship, as a member of the famed bin Laden family and one of the many heirs to the fortune of construction magnate Mohammed bin Laden, Osama enjoyed unprecedented personal access to the Saudi royal family, including Prince Turki al-Faisal, the head of Saudi intelligence during the run-up to 9/11.

What’s more, bin Laden’s wealthy and influential family was itself connected to the highest levels of the American business establishment and was actively protected by the US government on numerous occasions.

Bin Laden’s eldest half-brother, Salem bin Laden, co-founded Arbusto Energy in 1978 with George W. Bush. Arbusto, which was rebranded as “Bush Exploration Co.” and went millions of dollars in debt in its first years of operation, was rescued when it was bought out by Harken Energy, itself plagued by scandal and questions about its connections to the infamous Bank of Credit and Commerce International.

But the bin Laden family’s connections to the US establishment do not end there. In 1996, FBI agents in the Washington field office were investigating the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, a suspected terrorist organization that included Abdullah bin Laden, the group’s president and treasurer, and Omar bin Laden, both half-brothers of Osama. BBC News uncovered internal FBI documents showing how the agents were ordered to stop their investigation of the brothers. The case was only reopened the week after 9/11 and the day after both brothers fled the US with FBI permission.

In 1998, another FBI investigation into the bin Laden brothers, this one initiated by the New York field office, was called off by the State Department because, it was revealed, the bin Laden family had been granted Saudi diplomatic passports in 1996 and thus had diplomatic immunity inside the United States.

Former US President George H. W. Bush is known to have met with the bin Ladens in Saudi Arabia at least twice in his role as an adviser to The Carlyle Group, the global private equity firm. On the morning of 9/11, Osama bin Laden’s half-brother, Shafiq bin Laden, was the guest of honour at a meeting of the Carlyle Group in Washington, which George H.W. Bush was also addressing.

And, infamously, in the days after 9/11, two dozen members of the bin Laden family and over 100 members of the Saudi royal family were flown to assembly points in Texas and Washington and then flown out of the country. At least one of these flights took place during the total ban on civilian air traffic over North American airspace. The FBI’s own documents show that the Bureau believed the bin Laden family flight out of the country—carrying suspected terrorists Abdullah and Omar bin Laden—was chartered by Osama bin Laden himself. Even so, some of the passengers, including Abdullah, were not even interviewed in person by the FBI before their departure.

PRINCE BANDAR BIN SULTAN:We had about 24 members of bin Laden’s family, and—

LARRY KING: Here?

BANDAR: In America. Students and — His Majesty felt it’s not fair for those innocent people to be subjected to any harm. On the other hand, we understood the high emotions, so, with coordination with the FBI, we got them all out.

Unsurprisingly, none of this history became part of the official story of 9/11.

But there was an even more fundamental problem for the official story.

CLIP 2 TRANSCRIPT – “Bin Laden Disowned”

By 1994, Osama bin Laden, although still largely unknown to the general public in the West, was already being touted as a major terrorist threat by the US intelligence community. In April of that year, the Saudi government revoked bin Laden’s citizenship and, later that same month, the bin Laden family issued a two-sentence statement publicly disowning Osama. But both moves, it seems, were illusions.

According to classified intelligence reports, the Saudis had brokered a deal with Bin Laden when he left the kingdom in 1991. The Saudi government would publicly disown Osama, but they would allow him to leave the country and continue preaching jihad, even offering financial aid for his operations so long as they were not directed against the kingdom. This deal was evidently still in effect after the Saudis revoked Bin Laden’s citizenship in April 1994, as later that month Osama traveled to Albania as part of an official Saudi delegation.

The bin Laden family’s public disowning of Osama was similarly disingenuous. In 2004, Osama’s half-brother Yeslam bin Laden admitted that the family shared a joint Swiss bank account with Osama for several years after the break, and Yeslam’s ex-wife, Carmen, gave an interview in 2004 stating that she “cannot believe” that the family “have cut off Osama completely.” This view was shared by Vincent Cannistraro, the former head of the CIA Counter Terrorism Center, Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA bin Laden unit, and the French intelligence service, which issued a memo in the summer of 2000 claiming that they found it “more and more likely that bin Laden has maintained contacts with certain members of his family.”

CLIP 3 TRANSCRIPT – “Able Danger”

However, as revealed to the public in dramatic testimony on the floor of the House by Congressman Curt Weldon years later, this information was actively suppressed and officers in the program were ordered not to pursue these leads.

CURTIS WELDON: Two weeks after 9/11, I took the basic information in this chart down to the White House. I had asked for a meeting with Steve Hadley, who at that time was Deputy National Security Advisor. The chart was smaller. It was 2 feet by 3 feet, but the same information was in the center. Steve Hadley looked at the chart and said, Congressman, where did you get that chart from? I said, I got it from the military.

[. . .]

Now, Mr. Speaker, what is interesting in this chart of al Qaeda, and you cannot see this from a distance, but right here in the center is the name of the leader of the New York cell. And that name is very familiar to the people of America. That name is Mohammed Atta.

[. . .]

We have to ask the question, why have these issues not been brought forth before this day? I had my Chief of Staff call the 9/11 Commission staff and ask the question: Why did you not mention Able Danger in your report? The Deputy Chief of Staff said, well, we looked at it, but we did not want to go down that direction.

So the question, Mr. Speaker, is why did they not want to go down that direction? Where will that lead us? Why do we not want to see the answers to the questions I have raised tonight? Who made the decision to tell our military not to pursue Mohamed Atta?

SOURCE: CURT WELDON ABLE DANGER

CLIP 4 TRANSCRIPT – “Afghanistan Reasons”

The public was told that the war was a response to 9/11. That it was the first salvo in the global war on terror that “will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.”

But beginning with the invasion of Afghanistan and continuing throughout the so-called “war on terror,” a curious pattern emerged: the targets of the terror war always “coincidentally” happened to have geopolitical, geostrategic and geoeconomic value for the US and its allies beyond its status as a supposed terrorist haven.

Afghanistan affords a prime transportation corridor for rich Caspian Sea oil and gas reserves, a fact that led the Taliban to Texas in the 1990s for talks with Unocal.

As the heart of the so-called “Golden Crescent,” Afghanistan supplied as much as 90% of the world’s opium until the Taliban almost eradicated the poppy crop in the year prior to the invasion.

The country also harbors one of the richest treasure troves of untapped minerals and rare earth elements in the world, with copper, iron ore, lanthanum, neodymium, aluminum, gold, silver, zinc, mercury and lithium deposits estimated to have a value of over $1 trillion.

And, in 1997, Zbigniew Brzezinski—who, as we have already seen, helped draw the Soviets into Afghanistan by launching Operation Cyclone in 1979, thereby playing his own part in the story of Al Qaeda—wrote that American military intervention in Eurasia was going to be needed to assure America’s “global primacy” in the 21st century. He also warned that getting the American public on board with such a military undertaking was going to be extremely difficult “except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.”

Perhaps it is no surprise, then, to learn that the first major military directive of the Bush Administration—National Security Presidential Directive 9, calling for “military options against Taliban targets in Afghanistan, including leadership, command-control, air and air defense, ground forces, and logistics”—was requested in March of 2001, drafted by June, and presented to the president on September 4, 2001, seven days before 9/11.

DONALD RUMSFELD: By the first week of September, the process had arrived at a strategy that was presented to principals and later became NSPD-9, the President’s first major substantive national security decision directive. It was presented for a decision by principals on September 4th, 2001, seven days before the 11th, and later signed by the President, with minor changes and a preamble to reflect the events of September 11th, in October.

SOURCE: RUMSFELD 9/11 COMMISSION TESTIMONY MARCH 23, 2004

CLIP 5 TRANSCRIPT – “Torture”

On September 17, 2001, President Bush signed a still-classified directive granting the CIA the power to secretly imprison and interrogate detainees at so-called “black sites.” By November, the CIA general counsel was already attempting to expand the definition of “interrogation” to include torture. As the Jerusalem Post later reported:

On November 26, 2001, soon after the September 11 attacks on the US, the CIA general counsel wrote that “the Israeli example” could serve as “a possible basis for arguing . . . regarding terrorist detainees that ‘torture was necessary to prevent imminent, significant, physical harm to persons, where there is no other available means to prevent the harm.’”

But torture had not been foresworn by the United States and most other nations out of moral concerns for the rights of terrorists. It has long been understood that torture is useless for obtaining reliable intelligence from detainees. What it is very good at doing is getting those detainees to “confess” whatever their interrogators want them to confess. The CIA, under pressure from the Pentagon and the White House to produce intelligence linking Al Qaeda and Iraq, suddenly had a way to produce that intelligence and they would not have to wait long for their opportunity to use it.

At around the same time that bin Laden was retreating to Tora Bora, a Libyan national named Ibn al-Libi was captured by the Pakistani army and handed over to US forces at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Al-Libi was turned over to the CIA for interrogation under the agency’s new “enhanced interrogation” rules. Under the supervision of newly appointed station chief Rich Blee, Michael Anne Casey managed the handling of al-Libi, and it was not long before he was saying exactly what his interrogators wanted him to say: bin Laden had sent two high-level Al Qaeda terrorists to Iraq for biological and chemical weapons training.

Of course, the story was not true. Al-Libi couldn’t answer even the most basic questions about his tale: he couldn’t name any of the Iraqi officials involved, identify what biological or chemical materials were being used for the training or even identify where the training occurred. The Defense Intelligence Agency immediately dismissed the story as a fabrication, noting that “it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers.” Remarkably, even the CIA itself issued a highly classified report on ”Iraqi Support for Terrorism” warning that the claim of Iraqis training Al Qaeda agents came from “sources of varying reliability.”

By 2003, the story had completely fallen apart. Al-Libi had recanted his claim and the CIA had withdrawn all intelligence reports based on his information. But by that point, they had already served the administration’s purpose, becoming another part of the growing Al Qaeda/Iraq myth.

CONDOLEEZZA RICE: Several of the detainees, in particular, some high-ranking detainees, have said that Iraq provided some training to Al Qaeda in chemical weapons development. So yes, there are contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

SOURCE: Rice on Iraq, War and Politics (September 25, 2002)

BUSH: We’ve learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases.

SOURCE: President Bush Outlines Iraqi Threat

But fabrications about clandestine meetings and secret training could only go so far toward motivating the public for war. In order to really sell the public on Iraq’s centrality to the war on terror, it would be helpful for the neocons to be able to point to an act of terror undeniably perpetrated by the Iraqis. And, since Saddam Hussein was not willing to oblige, an incident would have to be created.

CLIP 6 TRANSCRIPT – “Seven Countries, Five Years”

GEN. WESLEY CLARK: About ten days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. He said, “Sir, you’ve got to come in and talk to me a second.” I said, “Well, you’re too busy.” He said, “No, no.” He says, “We’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq.” This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, “We’re going to war with Iraq? Why?” He said, “I don’t know.” He said, “I guess they don’t know what else to do.” So I said, “Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to Al Qaeda?” He said, “No, no.” He says, “There’s nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.” He said, “I guess it’s like we don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we’ve got a good military and we can take down governments.” And he said, “I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.”

So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.” He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” I said, “Is it classified?” He said, “Yes, sir.” I said, “Well, don’t show it to me.” And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, “You remember that?” He said, “Sir, I didn’t show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you!”

SOURCE: Gen. Wesley Clark Weighs Presidential Bid: “I Think About It Every Day”

Ultimately, the war on terror was not about Al Qaeda, and it was not confined to Afghanistan or Iraq. Instead, it was a blank check, a convenient excuse for achieving the neocons’ foreign policy objectives in the Middle East and reshaping the world in the process.

In 2007, as the war in Iraq was floundering, the neocons attempted to fail forward by redirecting the public’s attention to the next target in their war of terror: Iran.

CLIP 7 TRANSCRIPT – “P2OG”

In 2002, a Pentagon advisory group called the “Defense Science Board” proposed that the US government improve the Defense Department’s intelligence in the war on terror by developing “an entirely new capability to proactively, preemptively evoke responses from adversary/terrorist groups.” The new, secret counterintelligence unit, dubbed “Proactive Preemptive Operations Group” or P2OG, would field a team of one hundred “highly specialized people with unique technical and intelligence skills such as information operations, PSYOP, network attack, covert activities, SIGINT, HUMINT, SOF, influence warfare/deception operations” to “improve information collection by stimulating reactions” from terrorist targets. In addition to goading Al Qaeda terrorists into actually committing acts of terrorism, the proposal also called for “creating a ‘red team’ of particularly diabolical thinkers to plot imaginary terror attacks on the United States so the government can plan to thwart them.”

This stunning suggestion was reported briefly by veteran Los Angeles Times intelligence reporter William Arkin, who noted the dramatic expansion of the Pentagon’s reliance on “black world” covert operations in an October 2002 article, “The Secret War.” The article reports the proposal’s reasoning as given: provoking Al Qaeda into committing acts of terrorism would flush the terrorists out and expose them to quick-response attacks by US forces.

Other reporters, like CounterPunch’s Chris Floyd, had a different assessment: “In other words–and let’s say this plainly, clearly and soberly, so that no one can mistake the intention of Rumsfeld’s plan–the United States government is planning to use ‘cover and deception’ and secret military operations to provoke murderous terrorist attacks on innocent people. Let’s say it again: Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush and the other members of the unelected regime in Washington plan to deliberately foment the murder of innocent people–your family, your friends, your lovers, you–in order to further their geopolitical ambitions.”

Whatever the case, a remarkable story began to play out as the “easy victory” of the Iraq invasion turned into the protracted agony of the Iraq occupation. A cycle of increasingly violent sectarian attacks between Sunni and Shiite forces in the country also began to successfully target American occupation forces with ambushes, firefights, bombings and the ever-present threat to American vehicles, Improvised Explosive Devices.

The attacks increasingly became associated with a new group that had only sprung up in the wake of the occupation: Al Qaeda in Iraq.

 

 

17 Comments

  1. Hi James, you noted why invade Afghanistan, but why invade Iraq or is it for the same reasons and is there any evidence Al Qaeda/Bun Laden and/or Saddam Hussein were threatening Bush and his family by revealing secrets about them? And sorry one other question slightly out of left field but still related, how accurate is the film Vice on Cheney and how important is his role in 9/11 and the war on terror? Thanks for all your work, Justin

    • Justin, Regarding why US invaded Iraq – I read somewhere – that the US invaded because Saddam was going to take Iraq out of US petro-dollars. I don’t know if that is true or not. Perhaps the Amazing Mr. Corbett knows the answer.

      • Maxx,
        I have scene video of Saddam refusing to take U.S. (Petro dollars) for Iraq Oil.
        It should also be noted that Saddam set Iraq Oil refineries on fire because he knew they were coming for the Oil, and indeed putting those fires out was a very high priority for the Bush Administration. Oil is Energy. It is power, and it is what backs the Private Banksters Federal Reserve Notes. Indeed, Saddam was put high on the hit list when he declared he would not take Federal Reserve Notes for Iraq Oil.
        Also note that a former Director of the CIA declared “we will know that we are successful when everything that the American people believe is a lie”
        Is Data really the new Oil, or is it just very useful Blackmail material to be used to manipulate those who are the powers that shouldn’t be?
        Perhaps, the Oligarchs had depopulation in mind when they invaded Afghanistan, but they needed a place to set up that was close to Iraq.

  2. You should do a Bloody Al-Qaeda Clips vid containing only the stuff from the floor

  3. Mr. Corbett, You have made the most important documentary of the century so far.
    I hope you will place [ Al Qaeda ] the cutting room floor, alongside the group part1 to part3..This is essential. We need this volume of work to be available for generations to come. It is your masterpiece and a major part of any legacy you are creating. We thank you absolutely and utterly for your contributions to freedom and reality. Paul Scott

  4. An great episode in so many respects, but I was particularly struck by one point you made on torture; that it is a very poor way to get real information, but it is an excellent way to get FALSE information that can then be shaped and molded to fit any narrative of your choosing. Now I realize why it is so important to the GWOT proponents. When they need a reason to go somewhere or do something, they can just manufacture it out of the broken body and psyche of some poor devil.

  5. I very much appreciate the work you and Broc did on this documentary series. It provided a concise narrative with lots of useful information. I do hope in the future you dig into the domestic war of terror as this is clearly evolving in real time and picking up steam rapidly in the U.S. and elsewhere. Some examples of this:

    MSM and government narrative on January 6th….George W. Bush’s comments on domestic terrorists on 20th anniversary of 9/11….school shootings with “assault rifles” that then need to be banned…”hate speech”…FBI documents on domestic terror flags and symbols….”white nationalists”…Biden’s Philadelphia speech on the MAGA Republicans being a threat to the Republic…etc…

  6. It’s amazing -and a bit disturbing to learn- that so much valuable & relevant info had to be removed from this supperb documentary for the sake of time. It would greatly serve our interest on these key world-shapping-issues, that all those pieces so relevant for the greater puzzle to be understood, be put back ACTUALLY in their due place in order to make the whole story more comprehensible by including those omitted trails & implications.
    Thanks for your work, James, it is simply astonishing in its depth, research and quality!

  7. Consider a Director’s Cut? I watched the 2-hour Part 3 version but I found the information presented here in ‘Blood on the Cutting Room Floor’ really interesting and valuable. Somewhere down the road maybe a longer Director’s Cut version could be added.

  8. Venetians? The Royal Family? quoi? please point me to the relevant rabbit hole.

    • sorry – couldn’t find anywhere else to ask.

  9. Hi James, really enjoyed Blood on the Cutting Room Floor, it was as interesting and eye opening as any of your long documentaries. Most of which I’ve watched more than once and will definitely have to watch part 3 of False Flags again as there was too much information to absorb or process in one viewing.
    Whangen has already asked the question, but I will too just to make the point clearly that they aren’t the only one thinking along these lines.
    Have you considered the option of doing a ‘directors cut’ version ?
    Going back to redo False Flags might be too much effort and I understand the point you made when discussing the criteria you use but for future projects, it might be an option you could consider during the editing process.
    I’m sure that there are a lot of us who would watch even longer versions.
    You could always ask the question and see how many people say yes.
    Love your work, long and short formats. Looking forward to whatever comes next.

  10. Hi James For your Q&A I was wondering what your personal conclusion is in regards to how the planes were flown on the day itself and if they were separate than true commercial planes? Also i’ve seen reports of millitary Aircrafts on that day, is that accurate?

  11. I very much enjoyed this episode as I watched the entire AlQaeda series, which included watching parts 1 and 2 twice. I think what is most important here is to see how peoples are deliberately Divided into factions so that they can be Manipulated into killing each other without even knowing that they are being used by the powers that should not be. Are people smart enough to rule themselves?
    I think it was Thomas Jefferson who said that if a people wish to be free and ignorant, they wish for something that never was and will never be.
    Indeed, seek out the Truth and it will set you free from the lies that enslave, yet real knowledge does not come easy.

  12. 33:30 why do you think nobody would watch?

    i get it, if you dont want to do even more work as you already do all the time, amazing work, work that so many “journalists” could learn from it, but since you already did those talks and broc did those edits, you very well could have included it all in. would i watch a one hour longer part 1, 2 or 3? yes i would.

  13. If there is another Q&A session, I’d be very interested in exploring the role of Dope Inc. in steering events. You give it a cursory mention in False Flags 2 when you refer to the alleged hijackers’ connection to drug running in Venice airport before you return to analysing the implausibility of how they could ever have piloted those planes. I understand you can’t cover every angle, but wondering if it’s something you’ve looked into?

    Also, you might have already touched on this issue in one of the watch along sessions, but if you have any further comments to make on the role of the Israel Lobby and its influence on US foreign policy, its strategic regional interests behind the decision to invade Iraq when you analyse the role of the neocons post 9/11 in False Flags 3, I’m very eager to hear more.

    Once again, thank you so much for your incredible work. Your documentaries are a treasure.

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